The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by Anon1096 » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:09 AM UTC

bgee wrote: post #46

redthrow wrote: post #36

If Japanese people just used kana (like Korean people use hangul today), kids in Japan don't have to spend countless hours learning this complex (and often irrational) writing system. http://kanamozi.org/hikari959-04.html > If you really want to be native-level Japanese, kanji are essential There are visually impaired people who have difficulty learning kanji but speak Japanese fluently. Language is not just for peop…

The English language is also quite irregular both in spelling and grammer[sic]. Maybe we should start with it given that children around the world "spend countless hours learning this complex (and often irrational) writing system". Disclaimer: native Chinese speaker, non-fluent Japanese speaker, English sufferer edit: disclaimer and grammar...

Difference is your written English can be riddled with errors and people will still get it. As long as you have some knowledge of spoken English you can get your point across fine. The same is not true for character languages like Mandarin or Japanese.

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

#62

Post by laurieg » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:11 AM UTC

matt-attack wrote: post #47

kazinator wrote: post #33

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…

> I quite often have to reach for a dictionary when reading So when reading kanji, how do you look up a word (picture) you don't know? Since there isn't a minimal set of characters, the notion of "alphabetical order" seems impossible. Weird that I've never thought about this until now, but I'm honestly baffled.

Let's say I see the word: 銀行 and want to look up the first character. I notice that the left hand side is 金 so I go to a dictionary, turn to the kanji radical section[1] find 金 and then find the original character by number of strokes[2]. This character has 14 strokes. If you have any experience with kanji then counting strokes is pretty trivial.

Also note that on the site linked to common kanji have a red background. Many of the characters are obscure so radical + stroke count narrows done the choices to very few kanji.

[1] https://kanji.jitenon.jp/cat/bushu.html

[2] https://kanji.jitenon.jp/cat/bushu08002.html

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

#63

Post by sova » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:14 AM UTC

echelon wrote: post #49

Does anyone have frequency lists of vocabulary broken down by type (verb, noun, etc.)? I've seen word lists on Wiktionary, and I'm attempting to cross-reference jisho and other sources. How many words do you need to comprehend for daily competency? Would the 10,000 suffice? How many words do you need to be able to watch anime aimed at children (eg Bono Bono) or teenagers (Boku no Hero Academia)?

Great questions, let's figure out the answers! I think 6,000-7,000 words (just a wild guess based on experience) would cover a lot of daily conversation, plus specializing in whatever domain you're in a little.

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

#64

Post by bgee » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:14 AM UTC

angelsl wrote: post #59

bgee wrote: post #52

Disclaimer: native Chinese speaker, knows some Japanese, English sufferer Putting aside the argument of whether removing all Hanzi from Japanese text would actually be more efficient or not, the question to me is: why stop at Hanzi? Why not romanizating all the Japanese literature? Surely almost all the reasoning in favor of getting rid of Hanzi can also apply here? edit: grammar

That's essentially what Korean did. They replaced everything with their own morphophonemic orthography. But even then they still use Hanja to disambiguate sometimes.

I was not even talking about Hangul, the point I made was on using a Latin alphabet. If we are revamping the whole writing system, why reinvent the wheel if the main goal is "efficiency"?

edit: obviously Kana has already been created

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

#65

Post by Freak_NL » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:14 AM UTC

WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 wrote: post #55

WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 meanin…

Afterthought: Kawaii (cute) is actually 可愛い, also containing "可", which literally may mean something like "a thing that can be easily loved", or simpler, cute. But you wouldn't be able to guess that if you just know the Kanji.

Perhaps not the best example. Knowing that 可 is usually read 'ka' in compound words, and that 愛 is read as 'ai', you get to 'ka-ai-i', at which point the meaning of 愛 (love) will likely push you to かわいい (kawaii).

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

#66

Post by WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:17 AM UTC

Freak_NL wrote: post #65

WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Afterthought: Kawaii (cute) is actually 可愛い, also containing "可", which literally may mean something like "a thing that can be easily loved", or simpler, cute. But you wouldn't be able to guess that if you just know the Kanji.

Perhaps not the best example. Knowing that 可 is usually read 'ka' in compound words, and that 愛 is read as 'ai', you get to 'ka-ai-i', at which point the meaning of 愛 (love) will likely push you to かわいい (kawaii).

Of course, but you are assuming that you already know the meaning of "kawaii". My point is that if you don't know the word, you can't infer the meaning from the Kanji, except in very simple cases. That's why memorizing Kanji alone really isn't as helpful. Knowing 90% of Kanji meaning and reading doesn't help you much in understanding compounds/words.

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

#67

Post by bgee » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:17 AM UTC

Anon1096 wrote: post #61

bgee wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The English language is also quite irregular both in spelling and grammer[sic]. Maybe we should start with it given that children around the world "spend countless hours learning this complex (and often irrational) writing system". Disclaimer: native Chinese speaker, non-fluent Japanese speaker, English sufferer edit: disclaimer and grammar...

Difference is your written English can be riddled with errors and people will still get it. As long as you have some knowledge of spoken English you can get your point across fine. The same is not true for character languages like Mandarin or Japanese.

Not sure what you mean, both missing strokes or having another character that looks or sounds similar should not impair the meaning of a sentence to most Hanzi user.

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

#68

Post by Freak_NL » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:21 AM UTC

WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 wrote: post #66

Freak_NL wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps not the best example. Knowing that 可 is usually read 'ka' in compound words, and that 愛 is read as 'ai', you get to 'ka-ai-i', at which point the meaning of 愛 (love) will likely push you to かわいい (kawaii).

Of course, but you are assuming that you already know the meaning of "kawaii". My point is that if you don't know the word, you can't infer the meaning from the Kanji, except in very simple cases. That's why memorizing Kanji alone really isn't as helpful. Knowing 90% of Kanji meaning and reading doesn't help you much in understanding compounds/words.

> but you are assuming that you already know the meaning of "kawaii".

Have you ever been around non-native students of Japanese? This is the one word that is pretty much guaranteed to be known by all with an interest in anything remotely Japanese.

Your point is valid, but kawaii is perhaps not the right example.

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

#69

Post by y4mi » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:22 AM UTC

weinzierl wrote: post #57

rtpg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who barely scraped by the Kanji/readings of my N2 but have to do a chunk of my work in Japanese, I gotta disagree. Sure, reading isolated sentences with only 90% coverage is really hard sometimes. But usually you're reading whole blocks of text, so you have context. Also, maybe you don't know some kanji but it has similar radicals to other, so you can make educated guesses (only sometimes of course). I mea…

I don't disagree with your point in general but the irony is that your first sentence is an excellent demonstration of the parent comments point. I have no clue what a "N2" is and I'm not entirely sure what you meant by "Kanji/readings" . There are only six other sentences of context and they didn't really help to understand the first one.

In case someone else wants to know:

From a quick Google I gathered that there are 5 levels of proficiency you can certify with. They are N1 to N5, N1 is the highest rating.

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

#70

Post by asutekku » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:35 AM UTC

redthrow wrote: post #36

If Japanese people just used kana (like Korean people use hangul today), kids in Japan don't have to spend countless hours learning this complex (and often irrational) writing system. http://kanamozi.org/hikari959-04.html > If you really want to be native-level Japanese, kanji are essential There are visually impaired people who have difficulty learning kanji but speak Japanese fluently. Language is not just for peop…

Have you read japanese written only with hiragana? The language has so many homonyms it is hard to distinguish them from a text as it is a heavily context based language. I’d argue abolishing kanji and using only hiragana/katakana or roman alphabet makes learning the language harder after the very beginning when your vocab starts to increase.