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

> 90% coverage is not that great ... when an uncommon word appears

TFA muddles this somewhat, but the research referred to has to do with coverage of kanji characters in a corpus text, not words. Someone who can read 90% of the kanji in a Japanese text might understand significantly more or less than 90% of the words, depending on the text.

Also notable: the research behind this was based on newspaper text corpora, which one could expect to have a lot of kanji and kanji compounds that are uncommon in casual usage.

I know around 10,000 Japanese words. As far as kanji goes, I've studied some 1200 of them intensively; through vocab I know many more as parts of words. I quite often have to reach for a dictionary when reading.

If you know 777 kanji in some way (like associating them with meanings, through your native language) and you haven't crammed on any vocabulary, you absolutely will not be able to read a thing.

In fact, even if you continue that way and memorize over 2000 kanji, and recognize every single one in a given document, you still won't be able to read anything without vocab.

The broadened knowledge will help support vocabulary building, though.

Thanks for the link!

It looks like the article author used the kanji from the research as a starting point, but then randomly added in words endings or compound characters, perhaps as their own study aid.

Being fluent in Japanese as a second language, I agree with this. It's Zipf's law and sounds great, but 90% isn't as useful as it sounds. You'll mostly recognize a single common Kanji of compound words consisting of 2-3 characters, or common structural words. It's a far cry from being able to understand content you find in the wild.

Also, "understanding" a Kanji is an ill-defined term. Most Kanji have multiple meanings based on context, and many different readings. So for each Kanji you're not learning a single character, but possibly a lot more. Especially the Kanji that correspond to more abstract concepts you cannot learn by themselves. They don't have a concrete meaning like "eat" or "drink". You essentially have to memorize all of their word compounds, a single character does not help.

EDIT: I also started out learning Japanese by memorizing the top 2000 Kanji using Spaced Repetition. While it definitely helped, it wasn't nearly as useful as some of these marketing-driven sites want you to believe. Kanji meaning are too complex to be captured like that. Even if you "know" all Kanji in a word you'll likely not understand the word's meaning unless it's something simple and concrete. I think you are much better of memorizing and studying word compounds. Over time you will automatically "pattern match" the Kanji you see often to their abstract concepts.

Example from 1min of browsing a JP text: Take "可能" which is a very common word that usually means "possible". Knowing the two Kanji (tolerant and ability) it not going to help you. It could mean dozens of other things based on those simplified Kanji meanings. This is not an exception, the majority of words are like this. On the other hand, let me give you a bunch of words containing "可": 許可、可決、可能性、不可欠 (permission, approval, possibility, essential) and you start to pattern-match that "可" corresponds to something like "positive possibility", but it's hard to translate.

hgv