An Introduction to The National Language Research Institute: A Sketch of its Achievements
Third Edition(1988)/ HTML Version(1997)

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II.3.10 Studies on the Frequency of Chinese Characters in Modern Newspapers (Interim Report)

(Source 8, 1971. 90 pages)
These materials represent a part of the results of the investigation derived from newspapers published in 1966. In this investigation, the frequency of Chinese characters in the data used in the investigation of newspaper vocabulary was determined. These materials include the results for approximately 1/3 of the corpus in the following 3 tables. Table 1. List of Chinese Characters by Frequency. Table 2. Frequency List of Chinese Characters by Topic. Table 3. List of Chinese Characters in the so-called "gozyuon" order. Table 1 lists all characters appearing in the corpus in order of frequency and gives the percentage and frequency of usage. Also included is the frequency for each of twelve topic types of newspaper articles. Table 2 contains a list of characters by frequency for each of the 12 topic types. Table 3 lists all characters in the so-called "gozyuon" order with their frequency. The running total of characters for this preliminary report was 630,313, and the total number of different characters was 2,879. Of these 2,879 characters, the most frequently occurring 1,000 characters accounted for 94.1% of the running total, and the most frequent 2,000 characters for 99.7%. Of the Standard Chinese Characters, 1,827 occurred, accounting for 97.6% of the running total. The topic types in which a particularly large number of different characters occurred were social, cultural, performing arts, advertisements, etc. The number occurring in economics sports, etc., were particularly small. NOMURA Masaaki was in charge of the study.

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