Table of conjugation of the most frequent russian verbs

Hello,

After a short introduction to vocabulary aquisition using words frequency, I will bring in a tool to work on russian verbs.

Vocabulary acquisition

Vocabulary acquisition of a foreign language vocabulary can be active (e.g. learning a list of new words) or incidental through context (e.g. through speach, reading, movies). Each approach has its limitations and obviously they should be used in a complementary way.

Concerning the benefit of active learning of vocabulary, here is a quote from 2013, Corpus-based vocabulary lists for language learners for nine languages:

There are a number of studies that have indicated the usefulness of lists in word-learning, such as Schmitt and Schmitt 1995; Waring 2004; and Mondria and Mondria-de Vries 1994; as well as Hulstijn 2001 and Nation 2001, who found that the use of word lists seems to exhibit good retention and faster gains. In fact, “there are a very large number of studies showing the effectiveness of such learning (i.e. using vocabulary cards) in terms of the amount and speed of learning” (Nation 1997).

This study then focus on the usefulness of a list built from a representative corpus of a target language where the most frequent words would be extracted. The most frequent words being the most useful for the learner of a foreign language. That is to say in a more pragmatic way that a learner knowing the full taxonomy of birds won’t help him get a taxi to the airport, but knowing the most frequent verbs of motion will be a great help.

Russian verbs acquisition

Now let’s focus on the russian language.

Mastering verbs of the russian language is not only highly beneficial as verbs are cross-contexts, but also because from verbs are built nouns and adjectives. Once mastered, verbs opens up the horizon of new contexts (e.g. for verbs of motion ездить, лететь: moving in and between cities, taking a plane, going to Mars) and new vocabulary (e.g. поездка, проезд, приезд, полёт, летающий…) built from these verbs.

In 2013 was defined a list of the top 9000 most frequent russian words. That list of words, with words metadata, can be found here. The study about how the list is built can be found here: Serge Sharoff, Elena Umanskaya, James Wilson, 2013, Frequency Dictionary of Contemporary Russian Core Vocabulary for Learner.

From this list of words were extracted all of the verbs (around 1700) in order to build a ressource, that comes as a table, to help learners of the russian language.

Table of the most frequent russian verbs

The table of the most frequent verbs comes as a Webpage where the verbs are ordered by decreasing frequency, that is to say by level of mastering of the language (from beginner A1 to advanced C2). Verbs can be filtered and columns can be shown or hidden.

Also at the bottom of the Webpage are daily verbs, picked from the list.

The table is also available as a .csv file that might be frequently updated. It can be found here.

A more detailed presentation of the tool can be found on GitHub.

Why and how use it?

Table’s use cases:

• building cheat-sheets / memos
• preparing exercices about verbs conjugation
• constant learning of the daily verbs

The CEFR level helps identify which verbs are to be studies depending on the learner’s level. Also search and filter by criteria is allowed on the table:

• by group 1 or 2
• by CEFR level
• by reflexive form
• by stem, for example “работать” will return 15 verbs
• …

If you find any bug please open an issue at https://github.com/StorkST/CoreRussianVerbs/issues

What is next? Need help?

The next goal is to build 3 reference guides of these core russian verbs.

• One for beginners (A1, A2, B1) - 616 pairs of verbs
• One for intermediate (B2) - 673 pairs of verbs
• One for advanced (C1, C2) - 416 pairs of verbs

Sheets will show the aspect pairs of the core verbs and their translation.

Generation of these sheets from the table of verbs is already covered and the code should go public soon. Examples of sheets for the intermediate level RU/EN, and intermediate level RU/FR give you an idea of this, though translations will have their characters reduced so that content is limited to one sheet, e.i. 2 pages.

Translations, which were fetched automatically from original table, are most of the time erronous.

Efforts are substancial to cover translations of these sheets and your help would be very welcome. If you would like to contribute, send a mail to vchd+llt@pm.me with what you want to achieve:

• what to improve, e.g. translations, aspects pairs of verbs
• which sheet, e.g. beginners
• the target language, e.g RU/EN, RU/FR

Obviously contributors will get credited on the sheets and on GitHub for their efforts.