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

Post by FroshKiller » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 1:50 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 fenomas » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #146

fenomas wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I must say I don't know much about ateji in Japanese. In this case, though it does seem that the characters where chosen at least partly because of their actual meaning. It seems that it is both an ateji and a jukujikun [1] because the word does not come from the characters but the characters do have the correct meaning. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%AF%E6%84%9B%E3%81%84#J...

Post by mytailorisrich » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 2:25 PM UTC

fenomas wrote: post #153

mytailorisrich wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must say I don't know much about ateji in Japanese. In this case, though it does seem that the characters where chosen at least partly because of their actual meaning. It seems that it is both an ateji and a jukujikun [1] because the word does not come from the characters but the characters do have the correct meaning. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%AF%E6%84%9B%E3%81%84#J...

> the characters where chosen at least partly because of their actual meaning Sure, didn't I say they were in my post? The point was, in a discussion of how well X predicts Y, it's not very useful to examine a test case where Y came first and X was chosen post-hoc to match it.

Post by fenomas » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 2:31 PM UTC

mytailorisrich wrote: post #155

fenomas wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the characters where chosen at least partly because of their actual meaning Sure, didn't I say they were in my post? The point was, in a discussion of how well X predicts Y, it's not very useful to examine a test case where Y came first and X was chosen post-hoc to match it.

> Sure, didn't I say they were in my post? No, quite the opposite actually ;)

Post by jason0597 » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 2:40 PM UTC

asutekku wrote: post #70

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…

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.