kerecsen Wrote:

JimmySeal Wrote:@kerecsen, Where did you get that Kanji added over time graph?

From the Anki plugin called "kanji and success graph 1.2"

Cool beans. Thanks.

pm215 Wrote:it would be cool if you could add a new chart in three to six months time to let us know how it pans out.

Here is a 3 month update:



I'm at around 2700 cards and "only" 1300 kanji, so the slope is decreasing, but not dramatically so.

I'm surprised by the fact that a ~7,500 word list exists that equates to around 95% understanding and no one has requested it to throw into Anki and start reviewing.

I'm at about the 20-25k vocabulary mark and anki is only counting 2500 kanji or so for me.

It's not like one needs to learn rare kanji separately anyway... How often are you going to use 齟 and 齬 outside of the word 齟齬？Not even Japanese people would worry about writing such words in kanji by hand... (well, most of them..)

buonaparte Wrote:If you want to read

Pupular literature - 1000 to 1500 kanji
Contemporary literature - 3000 to 7000 kanji
Classical literature - 15000 kanji.

I'm seriously doubting this number because I remember reading somewhere that an educated Chinese person knows about 6000-7000 hanzi, and they don't have kana like Japanese. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't need to know more than 3k kanji for contemporary literature.

I don't understand this idea of "this is how many kanji you need to read this". Just read/listen/watch what you want and learn what you come across. Learning kanji and vocab in isolation makes no sense beyond beginner level.

Kuma01 Wrote:

buonaparte Wrote:If you want to read

Pupular literature - 1000 to 1500 kanji
Contemporary literature - 3000 to 7000 kanji
Classical literature - 15000 kanji.

I'm seriously doubting this number because I remember reading somewhere that an educated Chinese person knows about 6000-7000 hanzi, and they don't have kana like Japanese. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't need to know more than 3k kanji for contemporary literature.

As I said back on page 1, you can't really come up with a number until you define "read" and "know [a kanji]". 7000 might be accurate as the number of kanji that you would need to know to read modern literature if you assume (a) there will be no furigana, (b) you will never be able to figure out a kanji meaning from context, © "read" means 100% comprehension, and (d) you will be reading every book published. This is a very artificial situation, though.

(Same thing with "classical literature" -- I'm sure that more than 15000 kanji are used in the entire sphere of all classical literature that has ever been published in Japan, but saying that you need 15000 kanji to read classical literature is like saying that you need to know 1 million words to read classical English literature because that's what the OED has. I don't even think I know 5000 characters and I'm doing PhD research in classical literature. Although one thing you have to keep in mind is that once you get beyond the 5000-6000 mark, the vast majority of the remaining characters are simply minor graphical variants or obsolete kanji that represent standard words you already know.)

When I think about how much kanji one would need to know to be very well in reading(like really well). Is 4000. That's my aim, slowly obviously. In terms of literacy, 3000 is enough .

ta12121 Wrote:When I think about how much kanji one would need to know to be very well in reading(like really well). Is 4000.

No. Less.

It depends on what you want do with your knowledge of Japanese. I want to be able to read slashdot.jp (maybe including comments.. but probably not. I will be happy if I can just read the articles).. so I will know how many when I know I guess (I imagine it being reading an article or two one day, and not needing to look up/add any words to my deck). I think we all get a little lost in the numbers, and plotting where we are going to end up.. it makes me wonder why people don't do that with their L1, which helps me realize the place where I am when I reach this end goal (# kanji, # words, % comprehension, etc) doesn't really matter, as long as I am enjoying the process towards reaching it.

OP: Do you think you will ever purely focus on knocking out and getting a word for every kanji? At the moment, I read articles and chuck any unknowns into my pure vocab deck that I work on everyday.. recently, I realized that I am starting to sound out words I have never seen before, but whose kanji parts I have seen in other words that I know. I have therefore come to the idea that if I focus on a unique kanji per word I learn in my deck (isn't that what RTK2 does?), then it will make it much easier for me to progress in my readings.. Eventually I would go back to adding whatever words I find in the wild. What do you think? Does anyone else have experience in this?

aberu Wrote:Do you think you will ever purely focus on knocking out and getting a word for every kanji? .. .I realized that I am starting to sound out words I have never seen before, but whose kanji parts I have seen in other words that I know. I have therefore come to the idea that if I focus on a unique kanji per word I learn in my deck ... Does anyone else have experience in this?

This started happening to me almost immediately when I started adding Japanese words to my RtK deck. Instead of:
"gain -> 得"
I would have
"納◯（なっとく） -> 得"
etc...Sometimes I'd add other words as well.

edit: screwed up the card format lol