So for my reading practice, for efficiency, I'm looking for a compact reading passage that incorporates all of the jouyou kanji, say under 20 pages in total.

Looking at a page from a typical reading passage I'm now working on, if there are 22 typewritten lines per letter-sized page, and on average 8 kanji per line, then 2,136 kanji could I suppose fit into 20 pages or less.

So is there anything out there like this? Thanks in advance.

I don't know of any such passage, but that wouldn't be particularly efficient because you're going to be exposed to the super rare kanji the same as the very common kanji.

Thanks, that's a good point about rarely used kanji. I guess I'm looking for something that incorporates the maximum number of the commonly used kanji in the minimum number of pages. That way for each unit of review time I would be practicing on a greater variety of kanji (plus I'm not lugging around too many pages in my briefcase).

john555 Wrote:I guess I'm looking for something that incorporates the maximum number of the commonly used kanji in the minimum number of pages.

A regular book for adults accomplishes this pretty well. Though, authors do often have pet words and kanji usage. So maybe an anthology of essays by different authors, or short stories by different authors. Preferably both since fiction and non-fiction uses different types of language.

I know of no such passage, but here are some statistics for thought--

Kanji you need to know in order to have covered which percentage of kanji-use (on average) in about 1300 novels:

up to 10%: 11 kanji
up to 20%: 20 more kanji: 31
up to 30%: 33 more kanji: 64
up to 40%: 50 more kanji: 114
up to 50%: 74 more kanji: 188
up to 60%: 103 more kanji: 291
up to 70%: 148 more kanji: 439
up to 80%: 222 more kanji: 661
up to 90%: 348 more kanji: 1045

There's about 1,500 unique kanji in the 5,000 most common words in Japanese. I don't think that includes names, so if you're reading stories you're going to run into more name kanji.

How many pages do the White Rabbit graded readers amount to? I've only seen excerpts of the first book which have one sentence per page , so maybe the concatenation of all their books might amount to not a large number of pages.

Or another graded reader?

jessem Wrote:I know of no such passage, but here are some statistics for thought--

Kanji you need to know in order to have covered which percentage of kanji-use (on average) in about 1300 novels:

up to 10%: 11 kanji
up to 20%: 20 more kanji: 31
up to 30%: 33 more kanji: 64
up to 40%: 50 more kanji: 114
up to 50%: 74 more kanji: 188
up to 60%: 103 more kanji: 291
up to 70%: 148 more kanji: 439
up to 80%: 222 more kanji: 661
up to 90%: 348 more kanji: 1045

There's about 1,500 unique kanji in the 5,000 most common words in Japanese. I don't think that includes names, so if you're reading stories you're going to run into more name kanji.

That's nice, but if you only know 90% of characters used in a novel, you can't read it.

john555 Wrote:So for my reading practice, for efficiency, I'm looking for a compact reading passage that incorporates all of the jouyou kanji, say under 20 pages in total.

Doesn't exist. Stop looking for shortcuts, start at the beginning.

john555 Wrote:I guess I'm looking for something that incorporates the maximum number of the commonly used kanji in the minimum number of pages. That way for each unit of review time I would be practicing on a greater variety of kanji.

Just because you jam more Kanji into a unit of time, doesn't make your study time any more efficient. More Kanji in the same unit of time means less time for each Kanji. Less time than necessary for a Kanji means you haven't learned anything and just wasted your time.

You should instead start at the beginning. Try a graded reader, follow their instructions. It will give you all the Kanji you can learn at your level.

Would you say that learning "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" by heart is useful for the English learner?

Just the concept of a reading passage containing all of the jouyou is absurd enough that I'd bet it actually exists as an obscure poem. What a poem it would be too, simply considering how very specific the words get for some of the rarer kanjis, any story that uses them all would have to go to some rather interesting places.

Such a passage would be pretty useless if it only had one reading for each kanji anyway.

Stansfield123 Wrote:That's nice, but if you only know 90% of characters used in a novel, you can't read it.

I'm not saying you only need to know 1,000 kanji to enjoy dictionary-free reading forever. This conversation isn't about RTK lite. I'm just saying even in your entire average novel, you won't find all the joyo kanji. To try to find one passage that has them all is crazy.
And I just think that the comprehension statistics are useful to know when you're looking to get into reading, so you can know about how much frustration to expect and can plan accordingly.

Stansfield123 Wrote:That's nice, but if you only know 90% of characters used in a novel, you can't read it.

I've done it before.

Jackdaw Wrote:Just the concept of a reading passage containing all of the jouyou is absurd enough that I'd bet it actually exists as an obscure poem. What a poem it would be too, simply considering how very specific the words get for some of the rarer kanjis, any story that uses them all would have to go to some rather interesting places.

Well my first thought he was inspired by this real text: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thousand_Character_Classic

But Classical Chinese is a pretty different beast