Parse and translate Oxford English Dictionary vocab lists into target foreign language
Vocab aquisition is an important component of learning a foreign language. Obviously studying more frequently used words is beneficial, however it is often difficult to find reliable frequency counts because they either
- Include too many "helper" words (the, and, one, a, etc.) that you already know by heart
- Are biased towards a particular domain
- Were published by a source with questionable expertise in the target language
- Don't include enough words for the CEPR level you're trying to reach
Oxford Dictionary publishes excellent lists that resolve these issues
- "Oxford 3000" covers the most important 3000 words for A1-B1 levels
- "Oxford 5000" adds an additional 2000 B2-C1 words
but sadly these are only in English. However, as an English speaker learning another language I think you can assume the most frequent English words are going to still be roughly the ones you should target in the foreign language. Given that, why not just translate the Oxford lists instead? Even better, programmatically translate them to save a bunch of manual typing
WIP: I've created a rough first-pass to handle German translation and plan to generalize it for other languages moving forward