Reading news for information: How much vocabulary a CFL learner should know

This paper reports the findings of a corpus-based study on the vocabulary used in journalistic Chinese. Based on a 20-million character corpus of more than 27,000 news texts collected between mid 2003 and the end of 2004 from various Chinese media sources in different countries and regions, a character frequency list and three word and phrase frequency lists with two, three and fourcharacters were compiled. With reference to a consolidated vocabulary list that is based on six manually edited word and phrase lists in the public domain and contains more than 140 thousand entries, we estimate that the number of twoto four-character words and phrases used in journalistic Chinese is between 80,000 and 90,000. With the information about vocabulary size and usage in journalistic Chinese, we suggest that CFL learners should first focus on around 20,000 high to medium frequency words and phrases if they want to develop basic ability in Chinese news reading. Further, around 70,000 low frequency vocabulary is needed if they want to develop full proficiency in Chinese news reading. 摘要:本文报道一个关于新闻汉语所用词汇的研究结果。本研究使用了一个二千万字 的汉语新闻语料库,其中收集了从 2003 年中至 2004 年底由世界各地多家中文媒体发 表的各种题材的时事新闻报道 2 万 7 千多篇。我们根据该语料库建立了一个单字频率 表和三个分别由二字,三字和四字组成的词和短语频率表。根据对六个在互联网上公 开的总数为 14 万多条的词汇表的检索对比结果,我们推测新闻汉语所用的词汇总数约 在 8 万和 9 万之间。基于我们对新闻汉语所用词汇的计算和推测结果,我们建议母语 为非汉语的汉语学习者要获得基本的新闻阅读能力应该首先重点学习 2 万个左右的高 中频词汇。如果要获得完全的汉语新闻阅读能力,他们则需要进一步学习或知晓 7 万 左右的低频词汇。