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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