'A Freq Dict of Am Eng.' Â©2010 Routledge - comments anyone?

longshikong · Post by **longshikong** » Fri Nov 15, 2013 6:32 pm

I'm surprised I've seen little mention of this dictionary here or elsewhere. Here's what one reviewer wrote:

"The corpus itself is intended as a tool for learners, so in effect the FDCAE is the authors' guided tour through a powerful corpus-based learning tool. It can serve both as a standalone reference, and as a guide to getting useful information from the COCA or any other corpus tool...

Routledge's English Frequency Dictionary is so much better than the others that a learner of one of...

From: Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America
Number 31, 2010 pp. 120-122 | 10.1353/dic.2010.0014

http://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=s ... ontoya.pdf

This, incidentally, is the COCAE website.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Nov 16, 2013 2:09 am

Hi LSK!

I have Routledge's frequency dictionary for Chinese, and might get around to writing my own review of it one day if I find any points not covered by or worth expanding beyond what's in the following two reviews:
http://linguistlist.org/issues/21/21-2576.html
http://www.benjamins.com/#catalog/journ ... 5lu/sample
(BTW, Tony McEnery also wrote the excellent Corpus-Based Language Studies: An Advanced Resource Book, which includes some of his work on aspect in Chinese amongst its case studies of research using various corpora...so unlike most other books on corpus linguistics it isn't just all about English, and will thus be of a bit more interest to TEFLers in China).

I'd like to get the English one too eventually, but it doesn't seem as essential, as one can access the COCA (and also the BNC etc) at BYU easily enough, and I'm not sure that these books can quite replace learner dictionaries proper (which are much more detailed, and about a host of things other than just raw frequency). I'd probably prefer to buy the LDoCE5, or the Oxford Collocations Dictionary+CD-ROM (I bought it when it was only the paper edition), or indeed a relatively recent E-E-C bilingualization of an ALD, first than Davies' COCA-based frequency dictionary.

Related (assuming you haven't read it already!):
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=11048
.

longshikong · Post by **longshikong** » Sat Nov 16, 2013 4:33 am

I'd bought and read Routledge's Comprehensive Chinese Grammar and felt it was 10 times more comprehensive than any Beijing publication. Someone even put more than moment's thought into it's design before it hit the press.

fluffyhamster · Post by **fluffyhamster** » Sat Nov 16, 2013 9:43 am

The frequency dictionary is made and printed to the same dimensions and high quality as the comprehensive grammar, but uses an Arial-like rather than Times New Roman-ish font. There are a few typographical quibbles though - the headword characters are printed in bold, which could make the more complex of them hard to read in the indices (where there are no examples repeating the word in non-bold), while the slashes enclosing the pinyin (thus: /pinyin/) throughout the book are a puzzling and slightly cluttering annoyance. Probably the biggest downer though is that only the headwords are given pinyin (i.e. there's no pinyin for the examples), which will likely limit the book's use and appeal to intermediate level upwards, but as the examples are generally pretty short and snappy, those below intermediate could still get something out of it with a little determination (and the help of electronic e.g. Pleco rather than paper-based character look-up). FWIW I studied Chinese for about a year (postgrad dip) and lived in Shanghai for two years, and even though all that was almost two decades ago, I can read most of the examples in this dictionary without too much difficulty (tho I sometimes need to double-check my tones here and there).