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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

#161

Post by cdavid »

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…

I agree, and that's why I find wanikani so useful. After 7-8 years trying to learning kanji and always failing after 3-400, I have been using wanikani for ~ 6 months, and the system of building vocabulary on top of kanji on top of radicals really did it for me. I learnt 600 kanji in 6 months, ~ 2000 words of vocabulary, and I am quite confident I will reach 1000+ EOY.

Even at the beginning, learning the simple kanji, having the vocabulary I knew/heard living in Japan associated to the kanji made it very useful from the start.

For anybody learning kanji with anki, etc. and failing, I recommend giving wanikani a try. I am just a happy user. Disclaimer: I live in Japan, work in a mixed English/Japanese environment and speak simple Japanese w/ my wife every day

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

#163

Post by fortran77 »

Not really sure what the major point is. Sure, there's a core set of "units" (words / Kanji characters) that are useful when trying to learn a language. I didn't even attempt to speak English conversationally until I had about 200 verbs and 500 nouns and maybe 100 adjectives memorized. This lets you have useful conversations and basic understanding when reading, but it's still a struggle to get that last 10%.

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

#164

Post by derefr »

needle0 wrote: post #127
esrauch wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do kanji handwriting-recognition models even “know” (i.e. are trained on) all in-use kanji, or do they just not bother with some of the rarest ones because their presence in the dataset would decrease the likelihood of correctly matching more-common characters, which it’s overwhelmingly-likely are what you’re writing?

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

#165

Post by derefr »

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…

There’s some level of proficiency (whatever the percentage is) where each sentence is understood save for one word, and that word because of a single character that you can then look up in a dictionary. To me, that’s a useful level to achieve, because it means that you don’t have to constraint-solve sentences by guessing at the meaning of one character to decode the meanings of others, but instead can just hold onto the complete sentence minus one “hole” in your mind while you go look that “hole” up. Much less mentally-taxing!

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

#166

Post by irq11 »

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...

The characters of 可愛い do not have the “correct” meaning. Just like in Chinese, 可 means “can”, or “possible”, and 可愛い is a weird exception. (It’s also nearly always written in hiragana.)

Nearly every word involving the kanji 可 in Japanese has something to do with permission: impossible (不可能), possible (可能), permission (許可), approval (可決), etc.

That said, the kanji-centric view of the world is ineffective, and one primarily adopted by beginner learners who have not spent any significant amount of time studying words in Japanese. It is always better to just learn words.

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

#167

Post by furyofantares »

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…

> son, if you go to the plumbf tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks

As a counterpoint: “son, if you go to the jawn tomorrow morning, don’t forget to pick up some jawn”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-enduring-mystery-o...

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

#168

Post by Shorel »

Seems similar to what Fluent Forever (book, application and website) claims.

Memorize the 625 most used words to jump-start your language learning and then you can move to grammar and other stuff.

https://blog.fluent-forever.com/base-vocabulary-list/

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

#169

Post by Shorel »

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…

But in what order will you learn all the 99% (10k? 20k?) words?

I don't see anyone claiming: 'learn this 777 characters, and then STOP LEARNING'.

You learn the most frequent first. Then you start reading. Much easier than when you only understand 10% of the words.

So, you get to 90%. Then you read some text and you start to find new words from time to time. That's when you start using a dictionary.

Heck, I'm an avid reader and I am still finding new words (or old words with new meanings) in my native language!

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

#170

Post by Shorel »

furyofantares wrote: post #167
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…

> son, if you go to the plumbf tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks As a counterpoint: “son, if you go to the jawn tomorrow morning, don’t forget to pick up some jawn” https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-enduring-mystery-o...

We use 'vaina' for the same jawn in Bogotá.

Vaya mañana a la vaina esa y me trae la vaina.

Sabe qué, dejémonos de vainas.

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