How to estimate Verb Frequency · LinguaBLOX Language Learning

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How to estimate Verb Frequency

From a YouTube comment response:

You can judge a verb's frequency by observing how often that verb happens. Look around right now. What verbs are happening? Are you sitting? Do you more often sit or more often stand? Do you walk more often than you run, or do you run more often than you walk? How often do you drive? If you're a professional driver, then you drive often. If you don't own a car, you probably don't drive frequently. Everyone's verb frequency varies somewhat.

But there are some things that are always happening. Being is always happening. Happening is always happening. So the first two verbs I'd want to know, or at least as early as possible, are: 'be' and 'happen'. What is this? What's happening? I'd learn those verbs in the form of a question, and be able to give at least one answer to each question.

The first criterion of verb frequency is how often an action happens. The second criterion is how likely you are to talk about that action. For example, breathing happens more often than eating, because you're always breathing, but not always eating. But you're more likely to talk about what you had for lunch than you are to talk about how your breathing is doing. But again, the dietician talks about eating more than about breathing, while the yoga instructor may talk more about breathing than about eating, or at least more about breathing than the dietician does.

So if you can find the sweet spot between how often something happens and how likely you are to talk about it, you can estimate a verb's frequency.

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