I have been keeping this English blog almost every day since May in 2004 and I have written more than 130,000 words in it. If we pay attention only to its volume, it is equivalent of one thick paperback or it takes more than ten hours for a CNN professional announcer to read aloud all of them. It is quite a volume and I can't forget about the importance of keeping it every day. Anyway, I made the other day a small program so that I can analyze my vocabulary. It sums up how many times I have used each English word in my blog and compares the result with the LDOCE defining vocabulary list. LDOCE stands for Longman Dictionary Of Contemporary English and it is a very popular English dictionary for ESL students all over the world because all the words in it are defined only with the 2,100 words in the list. To my surprise, 400 out of 2,100 words in the list I have never used in my blog. It's not that I don't know most of the 400 words, but I couldn't use them until today. 400 out of 2,100 comes to almost 5% and it is quite a big bias because I have written more than 130,000 words. I'm now trying to use all of the missing words and I think it's a good training for my English.
Your analysis is very interesting. As far as I remember, I have never used the words like farmyard, loyalty, magician or refusal by myself in my blog. If I changed my life completely I could use these words.
Posted by: Koichi | February 20, 2007 at 11:11 PM