Paul987
New member
Registered: 2013-02-05
Posts: 1
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
Stansfield123
Member
From: Europe
Registered: 2011-04-17
Posts: 799
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.
Last edited by Stansfield123 (2013 February 06, 2:59 pm)
chamcham
Member
Registered: 2005-11-11
Posts: 1444
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.
Last edited by chamcham (2013 February 06, 3:22 pm)
Inny Jan
Member
From: Cichy Kącik
Registered: 2010-03-09
Posts: 720
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.
. 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 
