Hi, when using for $i (@phrase), the variable $i becomes an alias for all the elements in the list @phrase. In the first run it contains "apple", then "apple" , then "banana" , etc.. If you have this construct, you don't need the additional counter $j. A bit shorter would be:

 
for my $elem (@phrase) { 
    $wordfreq{$elem}++;
}
[download]

# or even shorter, but perhaps a bit unreadable:
$wordfreq{$_} for (@phrase);
[download]

Update: Thanks to chargrill for pointing out my typo, indeed it should be:

$wordfreq{$_}++ for (@phrase);
[download]

When printing out the results you might want to print out the name of what you found, for example:

foreach my $key (sort keys %wordfreq) {
    print "$key: $wordfreq{$key}\n";
}
[download]

Hope this was the answer you were looking for. Cheers Roland