The most frequent 777 characters give 90% coverage of Kanji in the wild • Hacker News Board

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

#71

Post by mytailorisrich » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:40 AM UTC

WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 wrote: post #55

WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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 simply learn characters but learn actual words. Learning characters in isolation would not be that helpful, indeed.

When you don't know a word (i.e. a combination) but you know the individual characters it is much easier to learn the new word either by guessing or checking.

In context, the meaning of 可爱 would be fairly straightforward to guess, for example. Even in English 'lovable' is a synonym of 'cute'.

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

#72

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:42 AM UTC

rtpg wrote: post #12

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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#73

Post by gibolt » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:43 AM UTC

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…

It is easy to lookup or ask the meaning of the 1-3 words you don't know in a sentence. It is best to always have some percentage of the content not be what you know, otherwise you will plateau.

If you are speaking/writing, much easier to form a sentence and search for the one word you don't know than search how to generate an entire sentence structure.

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

#74

Post by adrianN » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:46 AM UTC

matt-attack wrote: post #47

kazinator wrote: post #33

I know around 10,000 Japanese words. As far as kanji goes, I've studied some 1200 of them intensively; through vocab I know many more as parts of words. I quite often have to reach for a dictionary when reading. If you know 777 kanji in some way (like associating them with meanings, through your native language) and you haven't crammed on any vocabulary, you absolutely will not be able to read a thing. In fact, even…

> I quite often have to reach for a dictionary when reading So when reading kanji, how do you look up a word (picture) you don't know? Since there isn't a minimal set of characters, the notion of "alphabetical order" seems impossible. Weird that I've never thought about this until now, but I'm honestly baffled.

I find this to be the easiest way: http://kanji.sljfaq.org/mr.html

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

#75

Post by adrianN » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:47 AM 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.

It works perfectly fine in older computer games that don't have the resolution to display Kanji.

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

#76

Post by fao_ » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:50 AM UTC

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 know there are a lot of ideas that there isn't a "right way" to use SRS, and I'm sure that someone would argue that what I am about to say is a no-true scotsman or whatever, but the simple fact of the matter is that you were using SRS wrong. In this instance 'wrong' means 'inefficient', 'suboptimal', and 'in a severely defective fashion'.

You don't just load single words up into it and study them on their own, you load words, compounds, sentences, sentence fragments, radicals, etc. etc. and everything else you can, and the SRS system helps you study and remember it. I can understand SRS not being as useful to you if you were only using it for single characters.

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

#77

Post by wodenokoto » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:54 AM UTC

sova wrote: post #9

vsnf wrote: post #3

An interesting assertion, but the article is both vacuous and confusing. It doesn’t link to the underlying study, combines what one tends to think of as kanji (single characters) with more complex juku-kanji (multiple characters) with straight up whole dictionary words. Some of those words are presented with English definitions to the side, but most aren’t. Some of the kanji are presented with pronunciations, but mos…

A Japanese Logographic Frequency List (2000) Chikamatsu et. al https://researchmap.jp/YOKOYAMA_Shoichi/%E8%B3%87%E6%96%99%E...

Great find, digging up what appears to be the base of TFA’s list.

Some critique of using the linked list: That is based on a newspaper corpus from 93, which explains why day/sun is at the top, which they won’t be for list created from Wikipedia or television subtitles, both sources that are arguably closer to “in the wild”

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

#78

Post by redthrow » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:57 AM 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.

I'd recommend playing the excellent SNES game Mother 2 (マザー２）, a huge hit in Japan and nobody complained about the text being difficult to read.

Or you can watch one of the let's play videos with narration here:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=F_UrqsO2JQ0&list=PLC4EWNG6GsuY...

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

#79

Post by Legogris » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 6:58 AM UTC

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.

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 character you don't know than if they would have been written out phonetically.

Kanji: The Chinese characters in question

N2: The second highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). N1 is by many seen as a very high bar and many Japanese employers demand it if you'll be using Japanese as your main working language. N2 is generally attained after 1-2 years of Japanese studies.

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

#80

Post by jaredklewis » Sat, Aug 17, 2019, 7:07 AM UTC

A brief tangent, but something I've noticed is that the meanings of words like "fluent" and even "native" are so ambiguous and poorly defined, that it is almost impossible to have a meaningful conversation about language learning unless you avoid them completely.

The marketing materials for language learning resources tend to make full use of this vagueness, like this one does. I wish these resources instead did more to enlighten their prospects as to what one can actually expect to achieve and in what kind of time frames.

Languages are endlessly deep. "Native" is not even close to the top. Even amongst "native" speakers, skill with and understanding of language is enormously varied. Compare the wedding toast of a skilled public speaker with that of an average one. Compare a literature scholar's understanding of a classic novel with that of an ordinary high school graduate. It's night and day.

IME, 777 kanji wouldn't get you very far in a newspaper and certainly not a novel. It would likely be enough to understand 90% of ordinary emails and text messages.

So many great resources to learn Japanese with these days; this vocabulary list is not one of them.