So in Japan, when you finish elementary school you've learned 1,006 kanji. You're then expected to learn the remaining 1,130 kanji in high school.

Assuming you're around 13 years old when you start high school, what do you do if you want to read the latest book by Stephen King (or whoever the equivalent Japanese best selling author is) which probably use most of the 2,136 kanji? (When I was 13 I was already reading bestselling novels of various authors).

But in Japan, if I didn't know all the kanji yet, what would I do? Surely they don't simultaneously publish the same novels both with and without furigana? Surely I wouldn't be expected to keep flipping through a character dictionary looking up all the words.

Or is the reality that when kids get to the end of elementary school, although officially they only are supposed to know the first 1,006 kanji, they've already picked up most of the rest?

Aren't you forgetting Middle School(中学校)? I seem to recall that 3 year period was the time when I filled out my vocabulary and went from reading young adult books to adult novels.

yogert909 Wrote:Aren't you forgetting Middle School(中学校)? I seem to recall that 3 year period was the time when I filled out my vocabulary and went from reading young adult books to adult novels.

I'm going off my own experience: 8 years of elementary school then high school. 13 years old when finished elementary school. Maybe Japan is different.

john555 Wrote:So in Japan, when you finish elementary school you've learned 1,006 kanji. You're then expected to learn the remaining 1,130 kanji in high school.

Assuming you're around 13 years old when you start high school, what do you do if you want to read the latest book by Stephen King (or whoever the equivalent Japanese best selling author is) which probably use most of the 2,136 kanji? (When I was 13 I was already reading bestselling novels of various authors).

But in Japan, if I didn't know all the kanji yet, what would I do? Surely they don't simultaneously publish the same novels both with and without furigana? Surely I wouldn't be expected to keep flipping through a character dictionary looking up all the words.

Or is the reality that when kids get to the end of elementary school, although officially they only are supposed to know the first 1,006 kanji, they've already picked up most of the rest?

There is a fair amount of written material (particularly manga and light novels) written with more furigana, but if a younger person wants to read a book written for adults, they have to be beyond their grade in reading ability. One thing to remember is that their considerable ability in the language is a big asset -- if you know the context, the word (from spoken language), and at least one of the kanji you can probably figure out the word. Especially as a native speaker, you don't need to have studied a kanji to be able to read it in context.

I'm not aware of any research done on this issue (i.e. whether Japanese or Chinese children read less advanced material or less often than children from Western countries), although it's possible some has been done. It must be a bigger problem in mainland China, where there is no alphabet or syllabary that is commonly used in print.

john555 Wrote:

yogert909 Wrote:Aren't you forgetting Middle School(中学校)? I seem to recall that 3 year period was the time when I filled out my vocabulary and went from reading young adult books to adult novels.

I'm going off my own experience: 8 years of elementary school then high school. 13 years old when finished elementary school. Maybe Japan is different.

Japan seems to be the same as when I went to school in the US. Grades k-6 for elementary school, 7-9 for jr high school, then 10-12 for high school. This probably accounts for most of the discrepancy you are talking about. Japanese kids leave elementary school 3 years earlier than you did. And they are learning the additional 1130 kanji over 6 years, not 3.

小学校 (grades 1-6): 1006 kanji
中学校 (grades 7-9): 602 kanji
高校 (grades 10-12): 337 kanji

I imagine that advanced readers would be able to read novels aimed at adults with minimal effort by the end of middle-school; going off of my own experience (being considered an advanced reader all throughout my schooling), it is unlikely that they'd mainly read 'adult' books, though they might often read books intended for students several years their senior (from my own experience as well as my observations of my peers).
Of course, this will level out based on what kind of books they like, since some genres are more numerous or superior in certain demographics (probably why I still read young-adult books: adventure is pretty much absent in adult fantasy).

EDIT:
By the way, the eight year elementary schools I know about are all private (religious) schools; did you attend a private or public school? (simple curiosity; you can refuse to answer without hurting my internet feelings)

john555 Wrote:Stephen King (or whoever the equivalent Japanese best selling author is) which probably use most of the 2,136 kanji?

This is the assumption I am most worried/curious about. Not just that the best-selling authors in Japan are serious high-brow writers (weren't keitai novels very popular for a spell?), but that even high-brow authors use anywhere near all those jouyou kanji.

E.g. Natsume Souseki's Botchan (1906: full text at http://www.natsumesoseki.com/home/botchan) may be like Japan's Huckleberry Finn. Kanjiwild tells me that there are 1742 unique kanji in Botchan, and furthermore, only 1439 of RTK1's 2200 kanji are present. Assuming the age of the text doesn't completely undermine this analysis, on the one hand, a full quarter of the modern jouyou set isn't used, but on the other hand, several hundred non-jouyou kanji (jinmeiyou? extinct kanji?) are used.

So I guess I'd like to know more about how many jouyou kanji aren't used in modern grown-up novels, and how many non-jouyou kanji are.

It works the same way it does in other languages. I never read a Stephen King novel, so I have no idea how hard they are, but English speakers aren't taught the necessary vocab to read something like A Song of Ice and Fire (which is of a moderate difficulty), either. And yet, plenty of 15 year olds can read it. It works the same way with Kanji, in Japan.

It's not like there's a law in Japan that kids aren't allowed near Kanji that isn't taught to them in school. There also isn't a red line between literature for young people and literature for adults, across which no Kanji is allowed if it's above a certain level. I'm sure there's plenty of Kanji that isn't taught in school, that makes it into literature that's meant for kids.

If you read a lot growing up, your reading skills will be way ahead of what they teach you in public school, no matter what the language is. The reason why Japanese schools don't teach kids all the necessary Kanji to read a grown up novel by 16 isn't that kids can't handle it, it's that public schools, by their very nature, suck at teaching. Frankly, it shouldn't take 12 years of schooling for kids to learn 2000 Kanji.

It's worth pointing out that kids are forced to read a lot in Japan. At most of the junior high schools I was at there was a mandated 30-40min period every morning that kids had to read.

The libraries are stocked with books of varying degrees of difficulty too. Light novels were really popular and I spotted many students reading difficult books like the Monogatari series as well as some stuff from more literary authors like Murakami.

As was pointed out already, just because the school doesn't teach certain kanji doesn't mean the students can't learn them on their own. In addition, when schools "teach" a kanji, they are really teaching how to write it, not read it. I'd be willing to wager that many kanji that aren't "taught" till high school still show up in textbooks in junior high.

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aldebrn Wrote:...but on the other hand, several hundred non-jouyou kanji (jinmeiyou? extinct kanji?) are used.

Proper names I'd imagine constitute a number of them.

vix86 Wrote:It's worth pointing out that kids are forced to read a lot in Japan. At most of the junior high schools I was at there was a mandated 30-40min period every morning that kids had to read.

That's not "a lot". I used to spend 80% of my free time with a book in my hand as a kid. That's a lot. Half an hour a day is the minimum necessary to not end up functionally illiterate.

yogert909 Wrote:

aldebrn Wrote:...but on the other hand, several hundred non-jouyou kanji (jinmeiyou? extinct kanji?) are used.

Proper names I'd imagine constitute a number of them.

There aren't enough proper names in the book to account for several hundred non-Joyo kanji.

Don't forget that the Joyo list is something of a myth; you see non-Joyo kanji all the time even in stuff published today, not to mention 100 years ago. The recent expansion of the Joyo list helped somewhat, but there are still non-Joyo kanji used (often without furigana) a lot.

yudantaiteki Wrote:you see non-Joyo kanji all the time even in stuff published today

This. Almost every piece of reasonable length I put through Kanjiwild has a few non-jouyou kanji in it. Recent example, the subtitles of 耳をすませば the Ghibli film contains the following non-RTK1 kanji: 雫靖也吠澤醤噌噂叶牢 (though half are name kanji), and this one non-RTK1&3 kanji: 澤 (name).

[Zgarbas]

I never even realised half of those weren't 常用。Why on earth aren't the kanjis included in the most common household items(味噌＆醤油）,almost always written in kanji, not on the list =/.

Zgarbas Wrote:I never even realised half of those weren't 常用。Why on earth aren't the kanjis included in the most common household items(味噌＆醤油）,almost always written in kanji, not on the list =/.

Thanks for pointing that out! (Edit: corrected: using wrong RTK1 list, doh!) Of the 1503 kanji used in the top 5000 Japanese words in *A Frequency Dictionary of Japanese* (as provided by Nayr's Core5000 Anki deck), the following are non-RTK1 (RTK1 being 常用 with extras): 嬉揃遥炒溜紐贅籠餃撫賑鮎鞄姜壼儲撒這捧絆槍覗葱埃髭. There's about thirty entries in EDICT that contain these kanji, see the full list at https://gist.github.com/fasiha/605d2da380905abb89c5

But みそ and しょうゆ aren't in the top 5000 Japanese wordlist ! These were the first words I learned!

Edit 2: if you consider JMdict, there's about 600 entries using these: https://gist.github.com/fasiha/605d2da38...9c5#jmdict Choice excerpts 覗き魔; 覗魔; peeping tom. 埃; dust; one ten-billionth.

Frequency wordlists won't generally include things like restaurant menus, signs, food labels, recipes, etc.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Frequency wordlists won't generally include things like restaurant menus, signs, food labels, recipes, etc.

That frequency dictionary purports to be "based on a 100 million word corpus, composed of spoken, fiction, non-fiction and news texts in current use" and I'm devastated that Japanese cooking, which I am very fond of and thought the Japanese were very fold of also and therefore something that would be well-represented in such a corpus, is actually not, whereas things I positively dislike, like sports, are! E.g., #4618 = 運動会 "undou kai n. sports meeting"... I want my money back!

This reminds me of something that I've been thinking about since I don't have very much time to study Japanese every day. I was inspired by "A case for narrow reading" by Steve Krashin. The gist of the essay is that to do something like watch a tv show, read a book or understand a menu in a foreign language, you only need a small subset of the language. E.g. you wouldn't need to know any words describing the weather to order food at a restaurant. You probably wouldn't need to know any words unique to sports to understand a drama.

Even people who spend a lot more time studying than I do get impatient while studying endless kanji and vocab and grammar before you get to enjoy anything in Japanese. So what if instead of using a frequency list from a large corpus, instead you used a focused frequency list from a news article, drama, or movie. Using the simplest example, a typical news article is 500-1000 words and there will be a lot of duplicates so there's maybe 300-600 unique words. So, instead of learning 6-10k words, you could srs only those words in the article. Then when you read the article you'll know every single word without using a dictionary. Essentially you did your dictionary look-ups first. But here's what makes it even better. The next news article you read will contain a lot of the same vocabulary and grammar, so each article will be easier to read and you will need to learn less and less vocabulary to understand it. And you're learning by doing what you want to use the language for rather than memorizing sports terms that you're not interested in anyway.

Among other things, I want to be able to enjoy a Japanese dramas. I don't quite have the vocabulary to do that yet so I'm considering this experiment. I'm planning on getting the Japanese subtitles to a Japanese drama that I've already watched with english subtitles. I'll parse the subtitles and make a vocabulary list for each episode and SRS the list. I expect I'll have under 1,000 vocabulary to learn (much less than if I followed a frequency list) Then I'll watch the episode - maybe a few times if I feel it'll help. Then move onto the next episode. Much of the vocabulary will be the same in subsequent episodes, so each episode will require less and less study.

Of course I'll do this alongside my regular studies, but I'm hoping it'll gain me entry to enjoying native material sooner then otherwise. It's also good because although I don't feel like spending more then an hour or so per day studying, I don't mind watching Japanese TV for more then that. So being able to understand native materials effectively increases my "study" time.

Yes, that's definitely a very effective way to stay motivated by learning only what you're interested in. I often wish I had some specific area I was interested in like that, that I could use for Japanese. I'm not interested in anime, or manga, I think the Japanese news media is crap, not interested in sports, or cooking... I will just have to keep looking

ktcgx Wrote:Yes, that's definitely a very effective way to stay motivated by learning only what you're interested in. I often wish I had some specific area I was interested in like that, that I could use for Japanese. I'm not interested in anime, or manga, I think the Japanese news media is crap, not interested in sports, or cooking... I will just have to keep looking

Well, presumably you are learning Japanese in order to use the language somehow. What do you have in mind to do with the language?

Haha, I actually am not too sure what I want to do in life.

Let me tell you the story about how I got into learning Japanese, and why I continued.

When I was at intermediate school (in NZ we have 3 schools, intermediate being somewhat equivalent to junior high, we attend when we are 11 and 12 years old), we had to study both Maori and Japanese. I wasn't too interested in either language really (owing to both teachers not being fantastic), but during my time at that school, my uncle married a Taiwanese woman, and her family came over for the second wedding. Everyone in her family could speak English, except for her mother, who only spoke Taiwanese, Chinese (not sure which one), and Japanese. So at a young age, I felt very intrinsically aware of the need to learn different languages and that you couldn't and shouldn't just assume that you can get by with English. So I continued with Japanese throughout high school and university. Because I didn't have any other clear direction I wanted to head in in life anyway. I guess maybe I could look at doing translation, or teaching Japanese (or English), but I'm not sure I could ever get my language good enough to be a translator. I guess we'll see. I guess I am kinda worried about my future, but I'm trying not to think about it just yet, since I have JLPT N2 to study for, and honours to do next year.

ktcgx Wrote:Haha, I actually am not too sure what I want to do in life.

Let me tell you the story about how I got into learning Japanese, and why I continued.

When I was at intermediate school (in NZ we have 3 schools, intermediate being somewhat equivalent to junior high, we attend when we are 11 and 12 years old), we had to study both Maori and Japanese. I wasn't too interested in either language really (owing to both teachers not being fantastic), but during my time at that school, my uncle married a Taiwanese woman, and her family came over for the second wedding. Everyone in her family could speak English, except for her mother, who only spoke Taiwanese, Chinese (not sure which one), and Japanese. So at a young age, I felt very intrinsically aware of the need to learn different languages and that you couldn't and shouldn't just assume that you can get by with English. So I continued with Japanese throughout high school and university. Because I didn't have any other clear direction I wanted to head in in life anyway. I guess maybe I could look at doing translation, or teaching Japanese (or English), but I'm not sure I could ever get my language good enough to be a translator. I guess we'll see. I guess I am kinda worried about my future, but I'm trying not to think about it just yet, since I have JLPT N2 to study for, and honours to do next year.

I see. If you don't mind me saying, you should probably find something that you are super interested in before deciding on a career. Otherwise it probably won't work out too well. For me, it took getting discouraged with college and just taking a bunch of random classes I was interested in before I found my life's work.

Yeah, I'm hoping something clicks in the next year or 2. Because I am getting kinda old now. Well, old for starting a career, or rather, the traditional age for starting one.

yogert909 Wrote:This reminds me of something that I've been thinking about since I don't have very much time to study Japanese every day. I was inspired by "A case for narrow reading" by Steve Krashin. The gist of the essay is that to do something like watch a tv show, read a book or understand a menu in a foreign language, you only need a small subset of the language. E.g. you wouldn't need to know any words describing the weather to order food at a restaurant. You probably wouldn't need to know any words unique to sports to understand a drama.

Even people who spend a lot more time studying than I do get impatient while studying endless kanji and vocab and grammar before you get to enjoy anything in Japanese. So what if instead of using a frequency list from a large corpus, instead you used a focused frequency list from a news article, drama, or movie. Using the simplest example, a typical news article is 500-1000 words and there will be a lot of duplicates so there's maybe 300-600 unique words. So, instead of learning 6-10k words, you could srs only those words in the article. Then when you read the article you'll know every single word without using a dictionary. Essentially you did your dictionary look-ups first. But here's what makes it even better. The next news article you read will contain a lot of the same vocabulary and grammar, so each article will be easier to read and you will need to learn less and less vocabulary to understand it. And you're learning by doing what you want to use the language for rather than memorizing sports terms that you're not interested in anyway.

Among other things, I want to be able to enjoy a Japanese dramas. I don't quite have the vocabulary to do that yet so I'm considering this experiment. I'm planning on getting the Japanese subtitles to a Japanese drama that I've already watched with english subtitles. I'll parse the subtitles and make a vocabulary list for each episode and SRS the list. I expect I'll have under 1,000 vocabulary to learn (much less than if I followed a frequency list) Then I'll watch the episode - maybe a few times if I feel it'll help. Then move onto the next episode. Much of the vocabulary will be the same in subsequent episodes, so each episode will require less and less study.

Of course I'll do this alongside my regular studies, but I'm hoping it'll gain me entry to enjoying native material sooner then otherwise. It's also good because although I don't feel like spending more then an hour or so per day studying, I don't mind watching Japanese TV for more then that. So being able to understand native materials effectively increases my "study" time.

You might, or might not, remember this young person's post:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid213943

She seems to be progressing quite ok...

When it comes to drama, I find that often unclear speech makes the things a tad hard (that's not to take that I don't recommend doing drama - I truly do). Anime, OTOH, tends to be easier in that respect.