Hi there,

I was wondering, how do people 'know' exactly how many kanji they know? For example, if they used a different textbook than RtK, how would they know? If they changed textbooks, or finished another one (which, say, was 500 kanji), and then changed, how would they know? Do all textbooks put kanji in the same order??


Thanks!
Paul

Grab a list of the general use kanji.
Circle the kanji you know.
Count them.

There's no way to come up with an exact number of the kanji you know. Part of the problem is defining what it means to "know" a kanji. Usually people are just guessing or saying the number of what textbook they've used.

chamcham: You don't know any non-joyo kanji?

[RawToast]

I would assume there is an Anki plug-in to tell you how many unique kanji there are in a deck. That would give you a vague idea of how many kanji you can read.

Grab a list of general use Kanji, make sure they're separated by newlines.
Insert the list into this form: http://www.random.org/lists/ It's a random list generator.
Copy/paste the first 107 into a separate file.
Circle the kanji you know.
Count them.
Multiply the number by 20. There's a 95% probability that the real number is within 10% of this one. For instance, if you got 75 Kanji right, you know between 1300 and 1700 Kanji.

Whole thing should take less than an hour. Let us know how it went. If you feel like doing twice as many, you'll be twice as accurate.

P.S. If you want to know how many you can write based on the English keyword, you can just use this site (the Lab section), to review 107 random Kanji. If something comes up twice, remember to subtract it from your total.

yudantaiteki Wrote:There's no way to come up with an exact number of the kanji you know. Part of the problem is defining what it means to "know" a kanji. Usually people are just guessing or saying the number of what textbook they've used.

chamcham: You don't know any non-joyo kanji?

Of course I do. But just doing the joyo kanji will give a good enough approximation.

The Kanji Kentei Level 1 exam covers 6000 kanji total. That would mean extra 4000 kanji, many of which are out of use or include rare forms.

The 12,356 JIS X 0208 and JIS X 0212 font encodings have 12,365 kanji.
Link: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/wwwjdicinf.html

I doubt anyone would want to go over that entire set.

I think that the most common reason this might come up is someone asking a silly question. Just make up an answer that seems impressive, but not excessive. Or modest, if you prefer.

If you're taking standardized tests that are expecting you to know a certain number of kanji then you can use their standards as a benchmark too. The people that pass JLPT N1 probably know somewhere between 1500-2000 kanji since passing it without knowing them would be pretty difficult.

Not all textbooks cover the kanji in the same order, but most usually cover roughly the same set of kanji eventually.

Also, a note about the JIS specifications. There's different levels of the specification that correspond to how often kanji are used. The Level 1 set, which is what KanKen 準1級 tests, is the 3000 most-used kanji. This extra thousand is made up primarily of 人名用 and place names. However there's probably 200-300 that actually are used quite a bit that nobody ever realizes are used quite a bit.

Just look at your anki count, I do

[Zgarbas]

They don't . They just guess. And it's not like there's a fixed definition of what "knowing a kanji" is anyway. Chances are even the most common of kanjis will stump you from time to time (new compound, rare reading, what not). It's really no use worrying about it .
I say somewhere around 1000 if anyone asks because it sounds like a reasonable number.

Quote:How does one figure out how many kanji they know?

Silly question. Really.

Here you have a good Online Kanji Level Check:

http://www.mlcjapanese.co.jp/Level_Check_Kanji.html

Topic about rating you're japanese ability:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...0#pid87850

Inny Jan Wrote:

Quote:How does one figure out how many kanji they know?

Silly question. Really.

No question is as silly as calling a question silly.


And I personally either count them manually or go by how many kanji there are in each grade. So as an example: if you just finished grade 5 just add the number of kanjis in all the grades you've learned together:

Grade 1: 81
Grade 2: 160
Grade 3: 200
Grade 4: 200
Grade 5: 185

= 826 kanjis !

Although... it probably gets more complicated after you finish grade 6 and move on to the big lump of junior high-school kanji.

usis35 Wrote:Here you have a good Online Kanji Level Check:

http://www.mlcjapanese.co.jp/Level_Check_Kanji.html

I tried this out and it got pretty dang close to the number of kanji I have in my Anki deck (it was high by about 10%). Worth a shot for those that are interested in a rough estimate

Onara Wrote:= 826 kanjis !

A better phrased question would be "how much do you know about kanji" or "to what extend do know kanji". As someone said here, the problem is with the verb know. If you "know", let's say, 日, is it that:
"you can recognise it" or
"you can write it" or
"you know what it means" or
"you know how it reads (sometimes)" or
"you know all possible readings of it" or
"you know etymology of it" or
any combination of the above.

The question "how many kanji you know" is silly, it just shows that the person who asks that question doesn't really know what they are asking about. And anybody who claims plain "I know X number of kanji" without any further explanation what they mean by that, doesn't really know what they are talking about either.

Inny Jan Wrote:The question "how many kanji you know" is silly, it just shows that the person who asks that question doesn't really know what they are asking about. And anybody who claims plain "I know X number of kanji" without any further explanation what they mean by that, doesn't really know what they are talking about either.

Exactly, although it's easy to understand why people would ask the question.

The first thing you have to do before the question means anything is to define what it means to "know" a kanji.

There can be some value in having a rough idea of how many kanji you've studied in the early phases, but I'm talking about 300 vs. 800, not 317 vs. 334.

Now if you think keeping a record of how many kanji you've learned is a good motivational tool, go for it; I did this too when I was studying. I had a list in JWPce of what kanji I had studied so I could compare it with the Joyo list and see how many blue (unlearned) kanji were left over.