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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

#191

Post by nexus2045 »

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…

Heck, English is my most fluent language (though Chinese is my mother tongue) but I always have trouble understanding comments here on HN. I can understand every word and don't need to open the dictionary, but then I can't follow the logic / the point being debated / the thought being conveyed.

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

#193

Post by WalterBright »

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…

I would agree with that. I know about 1000 German words, and that covers the bulk of words people use when speaking German, but not the words that matter.

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

#194

Post by echelon »

Before this falls off the front page, I figured I would ask the following:

1) Does anyone have a resource for Japanese subtitles (in Japanese/kanji, not English)?

2) Does anyone have good frequency { word => frequency } lists? Especially if they are topical, eg. school-related, anime-related, industry-related.

3) What are the best programs for segmenting Japanese text into words reliably?

4) Does anyone have a vocabulary set for any given manga, anime, or film that you could study before watching?

5) In addition to Anki and Wanikani, what are good SRS apps or programs?

6) Does anyone use Skype (or similar) to practice with native Japanese speakers? How is it? How did you find people to practice with?

7) What is the inflection point (in terms of raw # of vocabulary) to being able to understand Japanese anime or drama? What JLPT level does this correspond to?

8) How many new words do you acquire per day of study? How long have you been studying? Have you taken any of the JLPT tests?

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

#195

Post by coldtea »

kazinator wrote: post #29
coldtea wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. If you have 90% you can more often than not guess the uncommon word...

That's if you know 90% of the words. If you recognize 90% of the kanji and know what they mean, that's not the same as knowing words.

>That's if you know 90% of the words

No, I'm taking about the premise of the article: if you know 90% of the words most widely used (that is, the above 777 characters for example). Not 90% of the words in general.

If you know the most likely words, you can more often than not guess the unknown words in a phrase from the context.

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

#196

Post by kerorin »

私はネイティブの日本語話者です。確かに777個の漢字を知ると90%をカバーできるとは思いますが、それがイコール日本語の90%をマスターしたとは言えないはずです。実際、この文章は極めて平易ですが、外国人にはそれなりの難易度になっていて読むのに非常に苦労するんじゃないかなと思います。 それから、リストのすべてをレビューしましたが、一部「経（ふ）」や「格別空」は言葉としておかしいです。また「恬然」や「整復」は明らかに頻出語句ではなく、ソースに偏りが見られます。

I'm a native Japanese speaker. I agree that 777 kanjis are contained in common sentences at the rate of 90%, but it doesn't mean you can complete 90% of Japanese. Actually, these sentences are very easy to read for Japanese people, although it's hard for foreigners because of the difference of vocabulary. I also reviewed the list. I believe「経（ふ）」and「格別空」are odd as a word. In addition, 「恬然」and「整復」 are not frequently appeared so I think there was a bias to choose sources.

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

#197

Post by Tharkun »

redthrow wrote: post #184
Tharkun wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it's good that more private businesses are using kana-based writing (including more widespread furigana usage), but I don't consider the problem being fixed until the mandatory teaching of kanji in compulsory education stops, and maybe I just don't know but there's no sign of that happening.

Give it time. Compulsory Latin education was very common for a very long time in large parts of Europe. In parts because the catholic church had a lot of influence. Now people barely even remember it. Many schools now offer Latin as an elective subject, and those who are into that sort of thing can study it to their hears contents, without wasting everyone else's time [1].

Something similar will probably happen to Kanji. They'll become more and more useless. And, eventually, education will adapt. Give it another generation or so.

[1] I realize that whether or not studying Latin (or Kanji) is a waste of time is a contentious point. If it's your cup of tea, go for it, but don't force it on others. Force them to learn maths instead.

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

#198

Post by htns »

echelon wrote: post #194

Before this falls off the front page, I figured I would ask the following: 1) Does anyone have a resource for Japanese subtitles (in Japanese/kanji, not English)? 2) Does anyone have good frequency { word => frequency } lists? Especially if they are topical, eg. school-related, anime-related, industry-related. 3) What are the best programs for segmenting Japanese text into words reliably? 4) Does anyone have a vocabu…

5) zkanji: https://github.com/z1dev/zkanji! It's got a dictionary from which you can directly add words into its study decks when looking them up, and it has handwriting recognition plus let's you easily find similar looking kanji (with shared components etc), which is great when tesseract ocr fails, or when the text is so blurry/compressed you can't really even see it clearly (the online Japanese war history archives really love to compress their scans).

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

#199

Post by kerorin »

kerorin wrote: post #196

私はネイティブの日本語話者です。確かに777個の漢字を知ると90%をカバーできるとは思いますが、それがイコール日本語の90%をマスターしたとは言えないはずです。実際、この文章は極めて平易ですが、外国人にはそれなりの難易度になっていて読むのに非常に苦労するんじゃないかなと思います。 それから、リストのすべてをレビューしましたが、一部「経（ふ）」や「格別空」は言葉としておかしいです。また「恬然」や「整復」は明らかに頻出語句ではなく、ソースに偏りが見られます。 I'm a native Japanese speaker. I agree that 777 kanjis are contained in common sentences at the rate of 90%, but it doesn't mean you can complete 90% of Japanese. Actually, these sentences a…

You can estimate your Japanese vocabulary size on this site. https://www.arealme.com/japanese-vocabulary-size-test/ja/

Here are examples of native Japanese speakers. Usually we can achieve 20,000 easily. My result was 36,000 words.

http://burusoku-vip.com/archives/1798300.html https://b.hatena.ne.jp/entry/s/www.arealme.com/japanese-voca...

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