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

Post by franciscop » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 11:56 AM UTC

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…

Post by sweeneyrod » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 12:29 PM UTC

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…

Post by mytailorisrich » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 12:38 PM UTC

fenomas wrote: post #141

mytailorisrich wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know for Japanese as meaning sometimes shifts from Chinese, but in Chinese the standard definition of 可 is "can, may, be able to". You obviously learn it by itself but as Chinese words are mostly a combination of 2 characters, you immediately also have to learn e.g. 可以 (can, may, be able to), 可能 (maybe), 可爱 (cute) etc. So someone who's learning characters in order to get 90% coverage (or whatever) would not s…

> the meaning of 可爱 would be fairly straightforward to guess To be honest this whole thread about 可愛い is more or less bonkers, because it's an ateji. The word's meaning doesn't derive from the characters, the characters got arbitrarily attached to an existing word because they were similar in sound and meaning. As such, the whole thing is about as meaningful as talking about how easy it is to guess that 珈琲 means "cof…

Post by bspammer » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 1:29 PM UTC

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?

Post by lkjhdcba » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 1:41 PM UTC

bgee wrote: post #52

Disclaimer: native Chinese speaker, knows some Japanese, English sufferer Putting aside the argument of whether removing all Hanzi from Japanese text would actually be more efficient or not, the question to me is: why stop at Hanzi? Why not romanizating all the Japanese literature? Surely almost all the reasoning in favor of getting rid of Hanzi can also apply here? edit: grammar