Everybody Who Uses Frequency Lists Is A Child-Molesting Holocaust Denier, Change My Mind: A Perfectly Calm And Reasonable Response To The Most Important Issue Of The Decade (Patreon)

Let’s be serious: there’s nothing wrong with noticing that the kids  at your local yeshiva are getting kinda thick lately. But you’ve got to  reign that noise in.

All jokes aside, though...

You must be guided by frequency lists but not led by them. Tools  like that should inform you(r process), but not deform it into a slog  and you into some Roman galley slave rowing uphill both ways in a  snowstorm.

Be led by your curiosity and interest.

Feed your curiosity and your curiosity will feed your Japanese.

Only learning “useful” Japanese is like doing the minimum to keep your child alive.

Sure your kids are warm and fed, but are they happy? No hugs? No giggles? Sad.

It’s like ducking boarding school: nobody punches you in the face — they only harm your body and mind.

Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with frequency lists.  Whether or not something is a poison is a question of degree (dosage),  not kind.

There is even less wrong with carrying around an awareness of word frequency: you do want bang for your learning buck.

And it is true that L2 learners often miss the boat and learn  really rare words while skimping out on not only common words but  ALTERNATE USAGES of hyper-common words like — in English for example:  give, have, set, put, draw and do.

Often, you think you need learn new words, when what you really  need is to learn alternate contexts/usage examples of words you  “already” know like 張る.

But since you learn words in context anyway (you do do that, right?) frequency will often make itself apparent to you.

Again, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a frequency list.  It’s just that too much structure becomes stricture, and stricture is  boring, and boredom is bad for you. Too little structure can be bad,  too, but we tend to fail in the direction of too much. Aim for that  sweet spot — just enough structure to help you grow in the direction of  awesome but not so much that you’re choked. In that sense, structure is a  lot like autumn clothing — there is an optimal amount for each person;  too much or too little will lead to suffering, and there lots of  individual variation.

Also, since we’re on the subject of word frequency, it’s worth  noting that while individual rare words are (by definition) rare, they  collectively make up at least 10-20% of any speech and writing. Meaning  that although you are unlikely to see any single rare word, taken  together they could easily account for one in five of all the words you  see and hear. And if you can’t understand every fifth word in a  sentence, you, my friend, are hosed — you do not understand the  sentence.

Make no mistake, you need a large vocabulary to function well. The  larger the better. So fussing over the order of commonness (I.e.  frequency) is almost as bad as learning kanji by frequency instead of  Heisig logic. It seems smart but it rapidly breaks down. It’s our  classic cold, modern, minimalistic, mechanistic, reductionist, brutally  rational, “giterdun” Anglo-American logic — and that’s good logic to  have, sometimes. But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s like eating  supplements instead of good food. Sometimes, it makes you feed dead cows  to living cows. Sometimes it creates monsters. Sometimes, you need a  bit of that decadent, organic, emotionally involved, curiosity-driven  Old World laissez faire. 

We’ll just politely ignore how much of the Old World is less  laissez faire when it comes to economics...You know what? I should  probably know better than to engage in evidence-free cultural  determinism. But then, given the title of this chapter, perhaps good  judgement has left the building lol.

The point of the story is...

You’ll usually get further by meandering thorough your L2 like a  gentleman brambling (is that a word?) through the countryside than by  turning yourself into a slave to some list.

Use frequency lists but do not be used by them. Be informed by  frequency lists but be led by fun and curiosity. Again, reality can and  will literally show you what is most frequent!

And remember: ain’t no problem wrong with disagreeing with me, just know that you’re wrong. Hahahahaha.

No, but, again, all jokes aside, I am not the method police. Do  what’s fun and what works for you. If it’s not fun or doesn’t work,  either change it or stop doing it.

Finally, sorry for this weird writing. Ironically, I’m pretty bad at expressing myself in words.