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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

#81

Post by csa »

adrianN wrote: post #75
asutekku wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It works perfectly fine in older computer games that don't have the resolution to display Kanji.

It’s functional, but definitely not optimal.

Even as a non-native reader, reading 100% kana makes my eyes bleed — I wouldn’t wish that on anyone who actually knows kanji.

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

#82

Post by oska »

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.

The counterpoint is that if you are fluent in spoken Japanese you can get by with a fairly minimal number of kanji (and complete understanding of the kana as well, obviously).

Which is the trend with native Japanese people too.

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

#83

Post by aikinai »

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.

If you're native or an advanced learner, you probably have a good guess at the pronunciation too, so you can just type it phonetically and have your phone/computer convert for you.

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

#84

Post by dredmorbius »

jacobolus wrote: post #11
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…

This is why picture books are so important for improving listening comprehension for young children. It gives them something to focus on so that hearing words they don’t understand or new grammatical constructions is less distracting, it provides visual cues related to some of those words and helps guide understanding of the story, and it gives the children and whoever is reading to them something to point at in disc…

why picture books are so important

Any references on this? Interesting.

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

#85

Post by Legogris »

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 don't have sources for this, but I am quite sure that 90% coverage of kanji occurrences will give you >98% comprehension coverage.

(Here I make the assumption that you'd know all the readings and all but obscure or archaic words for a kanji to count)

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

#86

Post by oska »

asutekku wrote: post #70
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.

We always get this reply in this (endlessly repeated) conversation. However, as the person you are replying to says, blind and vision impaired people are perfectly proficient readers using Japanese Braille [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_Braille

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

#87

Post by edflsafoiewq »

redthrow wrote: post #78
asutekku wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd recommend playing the excellent SNES game Mother 2 (マザー２）, a huge hit in Japan and nobody complained about the text being difficult to read. Or you can watch one of the let's play videos with narration here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F_UrqsO2JQ0&list=PLC4EWNG6GsuY...

Itoi intentionally eschewed kanji so that players would "not read the text by sight, but out loud, cherishing the sound of each and every letter".

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

#88

Post by innocenat »

redthrow wrote: post #78
asutekku wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd recommend playing the excellent SNES game Mother 2 (マザー２）, a huge hit in Japan and nobody complained about the text being difficult to read. Or you can watch one of the let's play videos with narration here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F_UrqsO2JQ0&list=PLC4EWNG6GsuY...

But games don't show you pages and pages of Hiragana. And it's old games -- it's accepted technical limitation.

Have you read pages and pages in Hiragana? Or even paragraphs? It's not fun, and it's take a lot of concentration.

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

#89

Post by redthrow »

bgee wrote: post #64
angelsl wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There have been notable Japanese people who argued that the Japanese writing system should adopt Latin alphabets since ~150 years ago.

https://ja.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%AD%E3%83%BC%E3%83%9E%...

I'm personally fine with both romaji and kana (learning kana is not a big cognitive burden anyways).

I'm even fine with kanji (or Latin or anything) if people learn it voluntarily. What's not ok is kids being forced to learn them in school.

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

#90

Post by barry-cotter »

Legogris wrote: post #79
weinzierl wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And still you're fluent in English (I assume) - it's not an issue with the English language but your understanding of the context. Japanese (and Chinese) work a bit differently than latin languages. Even if you know 100% of the kanji (very few Japanese people do), it doesn't mean you know 100% of the words - and vice versa. Since the characters are idiomatic, it also makes it easier to guess the meaning of a word or…

> Since the characters are idiomatic, it also makes it easier to guess the meaning of a word or character you don't know than if they would have been written out phonetically.

Ideographic, as in trying to portray ideas graphically, not idiomatic, as in using expressions like a native speaker

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