In the papers today was something about the Ministry of Education selecting 1000 words all English students should know after three years. I think they said they are the most commonly used words. For teachers out there, I think this list could be useful, as parents could be checking to see how many of the words their kids know.
So here’s a link to the 1000 words:
eje.edu.tw/ejedata/kying/200 … 0words.htm
PS Haven’t had a good look yet, but it seems OK. No ‘zero’ though.
Brian
You gotta be kidding, Bri, no sht, fck, pss, cnt or t*t and you deem the list acceptable? Maybe those words shouldn’t be in the top ten, but they’d sure be on my list of top 1000, at least if the students are to speak standard English.
America, American, and USA, but no Africa, Europe, and Australia! Apparently the word “Asia” isn’t all that important, too.
90% of the world’s land mass gone in a flash.
My favorites are Coke, hamburger and hot dog.
alleycat wrote; “90% of the world’s land mass gone in a flash.”
it’s the American Century, alleycat. but don’t worry, this too shall pass.
in the future, there will be no America
Kwityerbitchin’ about “America”, etc… 
The list is incomplete because it does not include “beer”. :shock: 
[color=violet]Shouldn’t that be “bare, beautiful”?[/color]
They must have used the China Post and Taiwan News as their corpora for word frequency. 
Hey, at least they are trying to do something to help the students learn something … on the other hand, seeing the interview on tv with the soldier trying to figure out how to make a sentence with the words in the book was a definite hoot!
The link doesn’t work for me. I didn’t have any more luck going through the site’s home page and clicking on the links there. Is the list posted anywhere else?
Hmmm, it disappeared. maybe they think noone will buy the booklet if the list is online.
I did a google search and found these links
udn.com/NEWS/NATIONAL/NATS7/1167037.shtml
news.sina.com.tw/newsCenter/focu … 221-1.html
Brian
I’m trying to think of words that my elementary school kids use a lot (or at least know well) that aren’t on the list. There’s no:
poo poo
shit
gameboy
better
worse
Canada
New Zealand
dinosaur
nervous
scared
scary
7-11
MRT
Taiwanese
check against one of my textbook wordlists - these are all easy kindergarten words:
ant
balloon
boots
butterfly
cabbage
candle
carrots
cereal
corn
daddy
dragon
duck
Up to ‘D’, but I can’t be arsed going on. It just goes to show that you can’t have everything in a ‘basic’ list. On the other hand they do have the following words, which I think would be a lot more advanced than zero, daddy, crayon or scared:
appear
become
blind
celebrate
cent (is this very useful in Taiwan?)
club
collect
future
history
knowledge
modern
national
etc
brian
The only word under the letter Z is zoo.
Well, what happened to zebra? Did you ever visit a zoo that didn’t have a zebra? I demand that zebra be placed on the list!!
And while we are at it: aardvark.
Any zoo worth the price of admission will have an aardvark or a group of aardvarks.
So, I vote for aardvark to be added under the letter A.
Please submit my comments to the Minister of Education. Thank you.
Who created this list anyway? Did they have any foreign input on it, or as usual did they just do whatever they wanted?
GEPT, anyone actually preparing kids for this?
Any ideas, advice, warnings?