Basic Words in Farsi: A Comparison of Six Studies

Vocabulary is one of the most important factors in foreign/second language teaching. Many scholars believe that the importance of this component of language is to the extent that learning the vocabulary of a language is synonymous with learning the language itself. Therefore, the selection and grading of lexical content of language teaching curriculums has become very important. Accordingly, using the marked words of the language and including the personal tastes and preferences in selecting the lexical contents of language teaching resources are the major challenges in Persian language learning. This study aimed to identify the most frequent words of Persian language in journalistic texts. For this purpose, over 100 working days a corpus of over one million and two hundred thousand words was extracted from widely circulated newspapers and was recorded to the database which was developed for this study. The corpus covered seven genres which included culture, society, politics, sports, science, economy, and fiction. Then, the frequency of each words was counted in the corpus. The resulting list of high frequency words was then compared with and validated against the results of other projects, including Hasani (1384), Bijankhan (1390), Mahakweb (1387), Hamshahri (2009), and Nematzadeh et al. (1390). The results of this comparison showed about 30% difference with the findings of other projects. This difference seems to be normal because the source corpora were not the same in these projects.