Power law and second language acquisition

The original formulation of Zipf’s law was based on naturally occurring word frequencies and their rank order in a given English language corpus. For one example, merely 135 words accounted for 50% of the total word frequencies. This could be extended to phrases as well. For foreign language learners, this means that there is some limited set of words and phrases which account for a large percentage of word and phrase occurrences.

If we leverage the mnemonic tools previously discussed, we can spend time to create a set of entry level learning tools which will be extremely relevant (and therefore worth the time in creating).

Suggested tools

For given words and phrases identified

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March 26, 2009 • Tags: , , • Posted in: Language, Memory

2 Responses to “Power law and second language acquisition”

  1. Francis O Reilly - September 3, 2009

    Hi there,

    Our website Memorista.com, which provides free mnemonics for basic vocabulary of five major languages, takes this approach. We have isolated about a hundred basic vocabulary elements for each of our covered languages and provided mnemonics for each one (and in most cases, more than one, so you can choose which works best for you).

    Try us out at http://www.memorista.com !

    Thanks – Francis

  2. Power law and second language acquisition - September 13, 2009

    [...] published at jeffmcneill.com on March 26, [...]

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