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e3928a3bc t1_iqw25l4 wrote

Reply to comment by thephairoh in The returns to learning the most common words, by language [OC] by orgtre

If someone knows only the word 'I', they can understand ~13% of your comment. (If you take understanding in the very narrow sense this post is taking it.)

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jcinterrante t1_iqx6eii wrote

This is probably why Hebrew scores so poorly on this metric. Many of these kinds of articles and conjunctions are added to the word with a prefix character. Like:

אבא - father

האבא - the father

But it’s not as if it’s any harder to spot the hebrew -ה than it is to spot the english “the” just because it’s a prefix rather than its own word…

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orgtre OP t1_iqwzdvz wrote

Exactly. To clarify: The original comment has 15 "words" (Google counts "," as a separate word...), 2 of which are "I", and 2/15 is around 13%.

The most common Chinese word is "的", which Google translates as "of", and at least in Google's selection of books it makes up 7% of all words.

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