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The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild

japanesecomplete.com

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Re: The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild

#21

Post by ignoranceprior »

diego wrote: post #6

The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence. For example, "son, if you go to the plumbf tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks." 98% is closer to what you need in order to read a text and have an idea of what's going on. See this article: https…

Just out of curiosity, how many kanji would you need to know for 98% coverage?

Edit: Doh, the OP link actually includes this statistic.

Re: The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild

#22

Post by coldtea »

diego wrote: post #6

The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence. For example, "son, if you go to the plumbf tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks." 98% is closer to what you need in order to read a text and have an idea of what's going on. See this article: https…

>The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence.

If you have 90% you can more often than not guess the uncommon word...

Re: The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild

#23

Post by sova »

ignoranceprior wrote: post #21
diego wrote: post #6

The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence. For example, "son, if you go to the plumbf tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks." 98% is closer to what you need in order to read a text and have an idea of what's going on. See this article: https…

Just out of curiosity, how many kanji would you need to know for 98% coverage? Edit: Doh, the OP link actually includes this statistic.

７７７ characters: ９０.０％ coverage １４７７ characters: ９８.０％ coverage ２４７７ characters: ９９.９％ coverage

Re: The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild

#24

Post by dwohnitmok »

dvduval wrote: post #4

Yes, I have been studying Chinese for about five years now and I can recognize about 2700 characters. Looking at this Japanese character set, I'm guessing I know 80% or so. I always act like charts like this.

There's a significant number of Japanese-only or much more common in Japanese than in Chinese characters on there.

Re: The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild

#25

Post by quicklime »

ekianjo wrote: post #14

Lol, 777 kanji is just too short to even be comfortable reading emails at work in Japanese. So what good is 90 percent if the only thing it allows you is to do shopping?

777 of the most popular kanji from general Japanese might not be useful for work emails, but if you find the top 777 from a corpus of your own emails, it might be.

It's not hard - I've done this before using a corpus made up of work documents. There's a part-of-speech analysts tool called mecab that gives the word stems, and makes it easy to find word boundaries (since Japanese doesn't use spaces).

The output went into Anki and it didn't take long before I was reading emails and documents at work fairly easily.

Re: The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild

#26

Post by GuB-42 »

diego wrote: post #6

The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence. For example, "son, if you go to the plumbf tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks." 98% is closer to what you need in order to read a text and have an idea of what's going on. See this article: https…

I noticed that it takes very little to understand what a conversation is about, but understanding the specifics is a different story entirely.

For example if you just understand the word "car" and the name of a place, it most likely is related to traffic. If that's coming from someone arriving late you can bet he is finding excuses ;)

That's a reason why you shouldn't bad mouth foreigners if they can hear you based on the premise that they don't understand the language. They may not be able to converse with you but they can still get the general idea.

Re: The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild

#27

Post by jackklika »

dvduval wrote: post #4

Yes, I have been studying Chinese for about five years now and I can recognize about 2700 characters. Looking at this Japanese character set, I'm guessing I know 80% or so. I always act like charts like this.

I've noticed the same where I can understand the basics of a Japanese program if there's subtitles. But there are some oddities like 食 being used in a verb (as in 食べる) or 行 as to go. But you still have good context and can at least understand the topic in most cases.

Re: The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild

#28

Post by kazinator »

> Take solace in the fact that Japanese Complete has arranged the kanji and the verbs based on a frequency analysis of the Japanese corpus.

Jim Breen's KANJIDIC has frequency information.

http://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/KANJIDIC_Project

> The 2,501 most-used characters have a ranking which expresses the relative frequency of occurrence of a character in modern Japanese. The data is based on an analysis of word frequencies in the Mainichi Shimbun over 4 years by Alexandre Girardi. Note: (a) these frequencies are biased towards words and kanji used in newspaper articles, and (b) the relative frequencies for the last few hundred kanji so graded is quite imprecise.

Re: The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild

#29

Post by kazinator »

coldtea wrote: post #22
diego wrote: post #6

The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence. For example, "son, if you go to the plumbf tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks." 98% is closer to what you need in order to read a text and have an idea of what's going on. See this article: https…

> The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence. If you have 90% you can more often than not guess the uncommon word...

That's if you know 90% of the words.

If you recognize 90% of the kanji and know what they mean, that's not the same as knowing words.

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