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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

#111

Post by dredmorbius »

jacobolus wrote: post #100
dredmorbius wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

OK.

Was wondering if that was research based or just personal experience. The hypothesis makes sense, but I'd love to see it substantiated.

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

#112

Post by ronbermejo »

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.

I think even if you reach the parent comment's 98% point, "N2" will not appear there. But 90% English is probably good enough to be able to reason "N2 must be some kind of level".

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

#113

Post by xxxpupugo »

wingerlang wrote: post #109
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…

How do you check your coverage? Or even how many words you know?

There are certain tests floating around, like they will try 50ish quiz to estimate your vocabulary size.

Those are not set-in-stone science, so it is just an estimate, but I take about 10+ over those years, and the the number from those estimates seems consistent.

Coverage, there is some paper to track, I just googled it.

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

#114

Post by monsieurbanana »

ronbermejo wrote: post #112
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.

I think even if you reach the parent comment's 98% point, "N2" will not appear there. But 90% English is probably good enough to be able to reason "N2 must be some kind of level".

I've personally always advised my students to increase difficulty once they've reached 87.5% accuracy.

(I'm just amused of all the % thrown around I this thread)

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

#115

Post by esrauch »

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…

Surely no one knows all the Kanji, since some of them have open academic investigation whether they even are a valid character or not?

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2018/10/29/language/ghost-...

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

#117

Post by WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 »

fenomas wrote: post #95
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…

> 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 learnin…

I agree that people with some Japanese knowledge likely already know this. But out there you will find a lot of marketing material/posts targeting absolute beginners promoting some kind of "Top X% Kanji lists", as if they are a huge shortcut and secret to quickly learning Japanese. So I'm just saying they aren't.

If you talk to people who don't know much about Japanese they often believe that memorizing the characters is the difficult part and doing so will help you understand a large fraction of written text. I think it's quite a common misconception.

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

#118

Post by franciscop »

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…

When I was learning English, the most memorable/epic lesson of advanced English I ever took was trying to understand what we were told was an "advanced" poem; the Jabberwock!

We were a class of 6-8 students, in pairs making our guesses of what the words that we didn't "understand" meant. We all got pretty advanced ideas and all got to similar conclusions. The teacher would tell us afterwards how those were made up words, and we were all in awe at how much we still understood and agreed upon the meaning of the words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

Sidequestion, is this poem taught in schools in the US by any chance?

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

#119

Post by WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 »

fao_ wrote: post #76
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…

I know there are a lot of ideas that there isn't a "right way" to use SRS, and I'm sure that someone would argue that what I am about to say is a no-true scotsman or whatever, but the simple fact of the matter is that you were using SRS wrong. In this instance 'wrong' means 'inefficient', 'suboptimal', and 'in a severely defective fashion'. You don't just load single words up into it and study them on their own, you…

Just to clarify, I did use SRS for all my learning materials, including words and sentences. But I also had decks for single characters (you can find a lot of these online). Over time I found these pure character decks to be the least helpful or nearly useless, so I dropped them. Using SRS for other things like grammar and words/compounds is great.
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