Also she encouraged focusing on functional colloquial/natural communication rather than “proper” Japanese (for this group, for the goal of this class). Example: 持ち帰り: we were taught the word in case we heard it, but encouraged to say “takeout” instead because it’s a common enough katakana word and everyone knows it. Higher chance of remembering/lower chance of pronouncing it wrong and causing communication trouble.
Which didn’t stop me from trying out 持ち帰り at my next opportunity, and it worked fine, but so did “takeout”, for the purpose.
I’m pretty sure most English speakers would be able to picture a crabigator even though it’s not a word.
This is the key, I think. In everyday conversation, people tend to extend meanings or spend more time explaining rather than use words with more specific nuances.
Aye.
It’s just like language knowledge for anyone. It depends on:
And what media they consume. Flowerier, more unusual terms can and do pop up very often in prose.
Take the word “ebb” for example. I think it’s safe to say that it isn’t very common in everyday conversation. But, having read a lot of books, I’ve seen that word many times.
In prose, you can get away with using terms that’d make people tilt their heads in confusion in real life if they’re deployed well.
A while ago, I was playing with scripts ang got some data. So here is the list of the rarest WK vocabs according to the frequency list provided by the The Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese. I included the 412 words that have a frequency over 30000. Rarest are first.
I don’t disagree with that, just let’s not misinterpret what the list means. Hitotsu and futatsu are very common and necessary words to know, not rare at all. They’re just rarely written like that. (apparently, I’m no expert)
Wait I’m confused? Why are only the ones with higher frequency than 30,000 included, excluding the rarer ones? Also, I don’t understand why you say rarest are first, when you include the lower frequency ones at the bottom? Why would a high frequency mean rare?
“Freqency” here means “rank”, I believe (i.e. position on the list), though I’m having trouble finding even a sample of the list to compare.
(Or, for that matter, the English list I used the last time this conversation came up, in order to make the point that people unquestionably know most of these words, they just don’t come up frequently in the corpus because the situation that you’d use them doesn’t frequently come up.)
