From a practical point of view, it makes sense to me to teach students common, generic expressions in a beginning language class–after all, we should teach them what they will use in the future when they take that trip abroad, right? I admit that my initial reason for consulting a frequency dictionary was to simply get that list of high frequency words to use in my curriculum. However, in the process, I realized that there is an even deeper reason to prioritize high frequency language in a curriculum.
I was also surprised that there were so many more function words than content words. In fact, 61 percent of the first 100 words are function words. Function words have little semantic meaning because their primary purpose is to express grammatical relationships; they belong to a closed class of words and do not move out of their category. Content words, on the other hand, have semantic meanings and belong to an open class of words–they can move between categories (an adjective can become and adverb, for example). Curious about the prevalence of function words, I calculated the percentage of function words in the first 100, 500, and 5000. See chart.
Frequency dictionary in hand, I sat down to compile my list of high frequency words that I would use to design a first-year TPRS Japanese curriculum. I expected to find some juicy nouns, verbs and adjectives to whip into compelling stories in collaboration with students. However, I was baffled when I saw that there were a bunch of words among the first 100 that definitely do not come up in traditional beginning textbooks. For example, わけ・ｗａｋｅ (reason), 〜れる・ｒｅｒｕ (passive form), 〜せる・ｓｅｒｕ(causative form), 〜ず・ｚｕ (auxiliary negation), 〜たり・〜ｔａｒｉ(auxiliary negative, ほう・ｈｏｕ (alternative). These are just a few examples. Upon reflection, I realized that I had the tendency to think of the frequency list as a sequence, which it definitely is not. Frequency is frequency, not sequence.
The shift to content words is rapid. The overview shows that among the 500 highest-frequency Japanese spoken words, the percentage of content words increased by 31% and the percentage of functional words decreased by 34%. I had accidentally stumbled upon Zipf’s law: Zipf’s law states that given a large sample of words used, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. With the percentage of function words significantly decreasing among the 500 high-frequency words, it becomes obvious that function words play a crucial role in high-frequency language. Ellis describes this phenomenon in his article: “In natural language, it is the grammatical words that often serve as anchors….it is the closed class ‘little words,’ the grammatical functors, that have both the highest frequency in the language and the highest connectivity or degree” (p. 146). Without these function words, it is “difficult or impossible to learn” other words (p. 146). The function words are the branches on which the content-word leaves sprout and they are interrelated. Those little function words contain the grammar. And since function words cannot stand alone, we must teach them in context, or chunks of language.