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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

#91

Post by xxxpupugo »

This means very little though.

Take me as English learner for example. I would say I was only able to understand everyday English without too much of a hassle, after I acquired like around 10k words, which as I just checked had a coverage about 98%+.

Noted, it is still NOT enough, actually far from enough. Right now I believe I master around 15k to 20k words, by various estimates, and navigating English on the internet is like a charm, very little context switch in between with my native language.

Still, reading literature is huge undertake for me. I would still need to pardon myself about every once a page that if I stumped upon certain unknown words/phrases and can't move on before fully understands it, my pleasure of reading would be ruined. Such comprise frustrates me still, to this day. On the other hand, I will never have a second thoughts reading most cryptic novel in my own language, understanding might still be a challenge, but unlikely due to my insufficient vocabulary.

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

#92

Post by ptaipale »

rtpg wrote: post #12
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…

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…

Tend to agree with you. Context is important.

If I hear something that amounts to "you idiot, get the schmonck out of my way", I'll understand even if I have no idea what "schmonck" really is.

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

#93

Post by nxpnsv »

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…

Your example is more like 85% coverage. Not that it changes your point much.

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

#94

Post by redthrow »

innocenat wrote: post #88
redthrow wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's no harder than having conversations in spoken Japanese where you don't see any text, kanji or otherwise.

It would look awkward initially, but that's just because people are just used to the status quo which is kanji-kana mix.

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

#95

Post by fenomas »

WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 wrote: post #37
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…

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…

> 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 don't think anyone passingly familiar with Japanese thinks otherwise. That is, I think you're arguing against a position here that nobody actually holds. The argument for memorizing kanji is that it makes it easier to learn compound words, not that you'll just know them without learning them.

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

#96

Post by asutekku »

oska wrote: post #86
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.

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

Just because they can do it doesn’t make it optimal.

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

#97

Post by wingerlang »

rtpg wrote: post #12
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…

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…

>> An aside: I've heard that when learning a language, you should be able to understand roughly 80% of what you're reading/listening to, because then you'll have enough of a base to not feel overwhelmed, while still having new stuff to absorb.

Funny as this is how I learned (and have similarly described) to read language X and it felt ___almost___ like zero resistance. I learned first just to identify each character by name, then somewhat how they were pronounced, then vowels, then how there were pronounced, then special rules for X, then special rules for Y.

All of the learning material clump them together from start, a few consonants, a few vowels, some of their properties, and rules on how to combine them. All at once, this made me ignore writing for years until I tried it my way which I think worked well (although it took some time, still).

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

#98

Post by oska »

asutekku wrote: post #96
oska wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just because they can do it doesn’t make it optimal.

And have you ever sought out what opinion Japanese Braille readers have of the system? Whether they find it "less than optimal"?

I can't find the references right now but my memory from reading up on it at one time is that users were very happy with the system, that there is a fair amount of material transcribed into Japanese Braille, that it's quite easy to learn and that children become proficient readers faster than child learners of the regular writing system.

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

#99

Post by andai »

xxxpupugo wrote: post #91

This means very little though. Take me as English learner for example. I would say I was only able to understand everyday English without too much of a hassle, after I acquired like around 10k words, which as I just checked had a coverage about 98%+. Noted, it is still NOT enough, actually far from enough. Right now I believe I master around 15k to 20k words, by various estimates, and navigating English on the intern…

In English there's a lot of words you only see in books, you wouldn't pick them up by listening. So the only way to learn to read literature is to read literature, and tolerate a certain % of confusion. I learned most of those words through repeated in-context exposure, and eventually one will get stuck in my head later in the day and I have to look it up.

The downside of this is, when someone asks while they are reading, "hey what does [word] mean?", I often can't tell the precise definition, because I never looked it up, but I can usually read the sentence and understand it with context.

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

#100

Post by jacobolus »

dredmorbius wrote: post #84
jacobolus wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am just talking about my own experience. But there are thousands of papers about early language development (which I have not read).

You could start with a google scholar search like https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=storybook+OR+%22picture...

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