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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

#131

Post by Tharkun »

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 good news is that this is a problem that's solving itself. Kanji, especially complex kanji, are dying out in favour of katakana. An anecdotal example, as little as 20 years ago, all the fish markets had signs for each fish, in kanji. Now all of those signs are in katakana. Many young people can't read the kanji for specific fish anymore. They can probably manage tuna, but hake? Pollock?

Most written communication is typed. Which involves typing each word phonetically (and then picking the correct kanji from a list). This is orders of magnitude easier than writing a kanji by hand. You can get by without knowing stroke order or without knowing exactly how to write it. As long as you're even vaguely familiar with a kanji, you'll be able to pick the right one from the list.

Give this another generation or so, and I expect the coverage of those "777" will increase to ~100%, and the number of kana-only words will increase dramatically. National pride and linguists be damned, convenience always wins out in the end.

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

#132

Post by mruts »

monsieurbanana wrote: post #114
ronbermejo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Exactly. You need to be in the zone of proximate development or learning isn’t very efficient. I remember as a teen I had a fixed mindset and would get 100% on every calculus test. The problem became that I liked getting a perfect so much that ended up actively avoiding harder material and just sticking with what I was taught in school. I was afraid of posing interesting problems to my self out of fear that I wouldn’t be able to answer them.

This is a dangerous and corrosive mindset that did a lot of harm to me and other people I know. It took me maybe until 25 to actually start to accept my lack of knowledge and incompetence and start to do something with it. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had the emotional maturity to challenge myself at a young age instead of pursuing destructive perfectionism.

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

#133

Post by timwaagh »

So what is the typical reason for people to learn Japanese? Is it a good destination for something more important than visiting a few shrines or buying rare manga? I'm currently learning vietnamese, another east Asian language. It's very difficult. I'm very good at learning languages, generally. But not this one. The only reason I'm doing this at all is i'm here anyways after my plans failed two days into the trip and I can't communicate so I'm alone and shit out of luck. I don't think I will know a reasonable level even after the three weeks are over. Waste of a trip but I still get some decent pictures to post online.

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

#134

Post by yorwba »

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…

Let me add that just as it's not enough to focus on learning Kanji, even learning compound words made out of Kanji is not enough. There are many Japanese words that are never or only rarely written with Kanji, and depending on the text there can be many sentences with no Kanji at all. I recognize 4000+ Kanji by knowing Mandarin, so I can somewhat read e.g. software manuals (many Kanji, some English loanwords) but children's books are too advanced for me.

The "777 Kanji for 90% coverage" figure is probably more relevant for illiterate native speakers. Based on a corpus of 167,281 Japanese sentences I had segmented and lemmatized some time ago, you'd need 2,685 words for 90% (up to "故郷", "birthplace", usually written "ふるさと"), 6,564 for 95% (up to "すらり", "slender, smooth"), 14,098 words for 98% (up to "鼻先", "tip of the nose") and 20,657 words for 99% (up to "恐慌", "panic"). Obviously the exact numbers depend a lot on the diversity of the corpus, so don't mistake them for fixed targets to aim for.

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

#135

Post by namelosw »

xxxpupugo wrote: post #123
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.

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…

Yes, Most of the time 可 means 'able' in '__able'.

But it could also be 'a thing that can be easily loved'. Rr simply, 'pleasing'. For example, 可口 means tasty. So, 可爱 could be understood in both ways actually.

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

#136

Post by vharuck »

timwaagh wrote: post #133

So what is the typical reason for people to learn Japanese? Is it a good destination for something more important than visiting a few shrines or buying rare manga? I'm currently learning vietnamese, another east Asian language. It's very difficult. I'm very good at learning languages, generally. But not this one. The only reason I'm doing this at all is i'm here anyways after my plans failed two days into the trip an…

I like learning foreign languages because it's interesting to see how they outline ideas and idioms are a great way to learn about the culture. So it's an enjoyable hobby that builds a skill (maybe of little value, but I can deceive myself).

I chose Japanese because I watch and read a lot of stuff from Japan. It's also very different from English, which is fun.

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

#137

Post by euske »

The frustrating issue is that they don't state in what situation. I'm certain that most people will just do fine with only 100 kanji characters for daily life, or no kanji at all if they're just a tourist. But if you're applying for a full-time Japanese speaking job in a Japanese company, knowing only 777 characters is a joke (which is about the 5th-grader level). Just like a programming language, the level of fluency required depends on a task.

p.s. just confirmed that the list is not enough for filing a tax in Japan. They don't have words like 所得 (income), 控除 (deduction) or 医療費 (medical expense).

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

#138

Post by thaumasiotes »

bsder wrote: post #101
Freak_NL wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Actually, I suspect it's a pretty decent example. Most non-native students of Japanese will almost always encounter that word in hiragana, katakana, or even Romaji--encountering that as a kanji is actually remarkably rare. The fact that the kanji for kawaii is an ateji makes it one of those odd ducks.

> Most non-native students of Japanese will almost always encounter that word in hiragana, katakana, or even Romaji--encountering that as a kanji is actually remarkably rare.

Interestingly, it's very common for students of Chinese. The word 可爱 (kě'ài, "cute") is dirt-common, but it isn't native to Chinese -- it originates as a loan from Japanese.

This isn't clear to the Chinese themselves, who use 卡哇伊 (kǎwāyī) if they want to refer to the Japanese word.

There's another modern word for cute, 萌 méng, which is also a loan from Japanese, though I think popular awareness of it as a weird loanword is higher, since its literal meaning ("sprout") is so far removed from the concept "cute".

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

#139

Post by dcuthbertson »

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 thought his first sentence made his point. I didn't know what an N2 was either, but from the context I thought it could be some kind of test he barely passed.

Maybe whether one can make a reasonable guess depends on more than the context - perhaps background, experience, and point of view. I know I've missed points that are obvious to others because of our differing perspectives.

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