Thread: Academic Word List?

Some of you might be familiar with this standard word list available in English. It includes the most commonly used words in academic texts, excluding the 2000 most commonly used words in English overall. Group 1 (the most common on the whole list) looks like this:

analysis
approach
area
assessment
assume
authority
available
benefit
concept
consistent
constitutional
context
contract
create
data
definition
derived
distribution
economic
environment
established
estimate
evidence
export
factors
financial
formula
function
identified
income
indicate
individual
interpretation
involved
issues
labour
legal
legislation
major
method
occur
percent
period
policy
principle
procedure
process
required
research
response
role
section
sector
significant
similar
source
specific
structure
theory
variables

What I want to know is, is there a list like this out there for words used in Russian scientific/academic texts? I'm planning to use the AWL from English (and my trusty Oxford Russian-English dictionary) to build up an academic vocabulary list, but I suspect that I'll be missing some commonly used (by natives) Russian words if I use just that method.

(I'm also looking for a frequency list for literature, but that's even harder, and of course starting from English frequency will be of almost no use at all...)

http://www.artint.ru/projects/frqlist.asp

В списках на этой странице слова не взяты из литературных произведений.

Может быть вы найдете списки более предпочтительные здесь -- http://www.google.com/search?as_q=%D1%8 ... afe=images

Thank you, but the trouble with the word lists linked to/discussed on that first site (both the older Zasorina list and the newer Sharoff one) are of mixed publications. Zasorina's corpus was just 23.4% scientific prose (a mix of liberal arts and hard sciences) and was deliberately balanced to try and emphasize ordinary conversation, with a heavy reliance on dramatic prose. I haven't tracked down the exact numbers, but the Sharoff list is similarly balanced with fiction (the site says 50%.) That's awesome, and I use those lists for vocabulary work... but I'm finding that words that are critical to understanding even basic newspaper articles on serious subjects are hundreds or thousands of places down the list. "Сообщить," for instance, is 4,060th -- but it (or other related words, all of which appear after 4,000 on the Sharoff list) appears in almost every newspaper article I've read, and on most of the science and political websites I've tried to read. It was even in a bizarre article on Friday the 13th my teacher printed out from Lenta.ru. But, the rate I'm going (about 100 new words per week,) I'll probably get to vocabulary words 4000-4099 sometime in May.

Since a) I'd like to not have to translate all the words on the Sharoff list just to find the ones that are likely to show up in academic texts and b) even doing that will probably depress important academic words in favor of a few that happened to have been in these corpuses (the AWL list replaced an older Universal Word List, which tried to do the same thing, only with a much smaller collection that didn't cover all the sciences -- and the AWL barely has a 50% overlap with the UWL as a result, with very few of the UWL top group showing up in the AWL top group,) I was hoping for a word list that is specifically focused on academic and science works. Searching in English hasn't worked, and I haven't had much luck with adjective selection in order to form a good query in Russian...

Originally Posted by lloannna

But, the rate I'm going (about 100 new words per week,) I'll probably get to vocabulary words 4000-4099 sometime in May.

What is your method to learn those 100 words per week ? Do they stay in memory?

I use Vocabulary Master from Transparent Language for review. I review at least 100 words per day (about 600 per week, since I end out going over the vocabulary from the current chapter from my class textbook more often,) trying to do different words each day. I use a couple of different list systems, so the same word shows up a bunch of different times. "мать" is on the "Top 50 Nouns" list, the "Family" list, the "Chapter 1" list, the "Nachalo Glossary - М" list... the old edition of VM remembers your 5 most recent attempts at a word, regardless of which list you were reviewing... so if I get "мать" wrong on the "Chapter 1" list, the other list scores go down and I know I need to review them. What's interesting is that when I get "мать" wrong, I often find that I've forgotten most of the other "Top 50 Nouns" entries, or many of the "Chapter 1" entries, suggesting that when I learned/reviewed something has a major influence on when I forget it (you'd think it'd be associated by type of word, or frequency of use -- but I routinely forget Chapter 5's "племянник" and remember Chapter 1's "внук," even though they're both relatively low-use words, and they're both "family" words.)

My biggest problem, bar none, is vocabulary, which is why I'm working so hard at it. I have terrible vocabulary retention in general (one of my classmates is exactly opposite -- she knows several thousand words stone cold, but still messes up really basic grammatical constructions, like "у меня есть...") and in real life I'm always too aware of the words I don't know (when I look around my room I see "candle, mirror, ruler, tweezers, blanket" -- which I don't know -- rather than "принтер, телевизор, компьютер, часы, бумага, каранаш, вилка, ложка, книга, бутылка, палто, компакт диск, вода, дверь, стена" which I do know.) It makes casual review (away from the computer) very challenging, though I'm slowly getting better. For the longest time I'd sit on the freeway saying "красная машина, белая машина, красная машина... машина, машина, красная машина..." and now (after about twenty passes through the colors, and two successive chapters where we reviewed colors) I can name the color of almost every car on the road without giving up and just calling everything "машина." And after over 125 classroom contact hours, I've very nearly got most classroom stuff (доска, карандаш) down.

Which reminds me, I need to get more transportation words. I see far too many trucks (as opposed to автобусы, машины or поезды) and other things I can't name yet (freeway, police car, signs, ambulance, gas station, etc.)

But first, academic words. I think I'll just translate the AWL and UWL to start out with, since I've almost finished scoring them (AWL placement getting twice the impact of UWL placement, the lower the score = the more important the word.) And I've got something like 1000 headwords to play with, whee!

Пальто

Ah, and also, my spelling is terrible. There are too many things to work on! Argh!

Ahem. Here's the top-ranking entries on my AWL-biased initial academic word list...

analysis/analyze
approach
assess/assessment
assume
concept
consist/consistent
context
data
define/definition
derive/derived
environment
establish/established
evident/evidence
formula/formulate
identify/identified
indicate
interpret/interpretation
involve/involved
method
require/required
role

(there are dual forms because the AWL compiler preferred verbs, and adjectives, and past tense in general, while the UWL folks preferred present-tense verbs and nouns; if each list had just one of two very closely related forms, and the other just had the other closely related form, I counted them as a single form, but will learn the Russian translation for both forms.)