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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

#121

Post by franciscop »

This is known in the education space, and tests like the JLPT N5-N1 are based on this! Also when learning English, the learning material and exams are based on this. The order of frequency is not strictly followed though, if you have to learn "Monday" now and "Tuesday" in a couple of days, it makes sense to bundle them all by concepts at once and learn "getsukasuimokukindonichi". So in Japanese learning, on a day-to-day it might seem like you learn random difficult-easy words or characters, but overall you only have to _memorize_ the top N characters/words for the next test and you'd be alright.

I made a free website to memorize Kanji that works offline: https://core.cards/. Initially I did maintain a list of the top 100, top 500, and top 1000 (approx) if I recall correctly, extracted from Wikipedia lists, to learn Japanese Kanji. But now I've switched it to just follow the JLPT because they were almost the same.

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

#122

Post by sho »

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.

> the irony is that your first sentence is an excellent demonstration of the parent comments point

And allow me to claim that you've actually proved your parent's point! I have no idea what an "N2" is either but from the context was able to accurately guess that it's some kind of proficiency test.

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

#123

Post by xxxpupugo »

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.

Actually, no. 可 is like 'the be able to' prefix in Japanese/Chinese, so 可愛 is can be seen as a compound word because of that, literally means 'is able to be loved'

In Chinese, it can be further compounded into many common phrases:

可悲(pathetic, 可+'sad')

可气(annoying/irritating, 可+'anger')

可怜(pitiful, 可+'pity')

可恨(resentful, 可+'hate')

What would be a more suitable example would be 可(ke)乐(le) in my opinion, in which case it means Coke in Chinese, it is a transliteration.

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

#124

Post by Legogris »

barry-cotter wrote: post #90
Legogris wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I had a feeling I was not using the right word, thanks for pointing out :)

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

#125

Post by Legogris »

esrauch wrote: post #115
Legogris wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Indeed. Which means if your goal is fluency, it's silly to strive for 100.0%.

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

#126

Post by kd5bjo »

dredmorbius wrote: post #111
jacobolus wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ve been looking into the research on second language acquisition a bit, and the primary mechanism for learning a language appears to be hearing/reading understandable sentences for content, rather than structure. When learning, some sentences in the text will make sense to you and others will be out of your reach.

I suspect that the role of pictures (or any other context) is to help correct your mental state of the narrative world so that the sentences you don’t understand don’t present an impassable barrier, preventing you from getting to the later sentences that will help you learn.

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

#127

Post by needle0 »

esrauch wrote: post #115
Legogris wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

No one knows "all Kanji" much like no one knows "all English words" even in native English-speaking countries.

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

#128

Post by krilly »

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 too convenient. How about "son, if you go to the butcher tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks."

With a bit of context it's usually easy to figure out the missing parts

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

#129

Post by grepballsoffire »

franciscop wrote: post #118
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…

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 wo…

Australian here. I studied it in school and so have my kids. They were equally amazed at how much meaning they could bestow on the words.

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

#130

Post by innocenat »

redthrow wrote: post #94
innocenat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spoken Japanese has intonation and rhythm which make identifying word boundaries and homonyms easier.

Reading hiragana (especially without space as word boundaries) is totally different. Reading long hiragana by speaking aloud help, but there is still a problem of ha/wa and he/e.

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