JxPlugin stats from my vocab deck keep an accurate tally on how much I can read. It's sitting at 1810 kanji. Climbs by 5 - 10 a day. It's a brilliant way to keep track of what you know as well as how mature it's all getting.

mezbup wrote:

JxPlugin stats from my vocab deck keep an accurate tally on how much I can read. It's sitting at 1810 kanji. Climbs by 5 - 10 a day. It's a brilliant way to keep track of what you know as well as how mature it's all getting.

love the add-on. Although I only have 105 cards, so that's like only 378 kanji, plus I don't bother putting in easy sentences, only stuff I don't know. Sentences may contain easy words too though so I suppose they'll get there sooner or later

kind of cool seeing my kanken 1 kanji list
祀憑巫疇擲贖烙孕蜃魍魎拵瑣魑胄
Shame you can't just copy and paste the list, you have to click on each individual kanji first

yudantaiteki wrote:

ta12121 wrote:

But 2042 is the necessary number of kanji to know+read.

2042 is a pretty arbitrary and exact number.  Where did you come up with that?

I'll say... you need to know what you stumble across and if you wanna read higher level stuff you have to know 3K+ even then theres still ones you'll run across you don't know. The jouyou is kinda like the bare minimum. I'd say kankens 1.5 level is a good indicator of the amount you need for high level reading (and which ones you need) and that's a total of 3000 so i'd say 3K is a fair number.


１級 ones in my deck:
龍裔曖痺彷肛彿奢愕軋贅炸撥躊躇掟猥膣攣痙輻眩芒逞浣瞼魍魎暈棗痣黴鵺頷悸悴魑颪斟睫扠疚逕

I consider these ones in the "relatively useless" pile. Still, every kanji is worth being able to at least read and know a vocab or two for it.

Last edited by mezbup (2010 February 09, 9:10 pm)

I can't really rate my ability because I am all over the place in each area.
But my current ability isn't is important as it continually grows exponentially.

Bare minimum eh. Makes sense though, you would need to know+understand context of over 3000 kanji to read some high level things. Unno where i got the exact number but it's always been stated in numerous places. Plus it's been stated by the Japanese government. But i always hear that the number of kanji "necessary" always goes up each year. So 2042 isn't exact at all.

Womacks23 wrote:

The number of kanji you need to "read" is far lower than 2042.

95% of the characters in a newspaper are made up of the same 1000 characters.

Misleading. Dangerously misleading.

Don't subsitute the number WORDS you need to be able to read a newspaper with ease with the number of kanji that make up those words. So what if you knew 1 vocab word for every kanji? That newspaper would still be a big mystery to you. The number of WORDS you need to know is a fuckton and 95% coverage isn't good enough because an article of 100 words and you don't know 5. What 5 don't you know? The 5 most important ones that convey much more specific or specialised meaning in relation to the topic.

Edit: yes, it is relatively true (no matter what you're reading) the whole 95% coverage thing... but 99.5% coverage is where fluent reading comes. 95% has you tripping up all over the place. People see it as such a big number and think shit well I guess if I know 95% of something I'm pretty much missing nothing but the truth is in this case you're actually missing heaps.

Last edited by mezbup (2010 February 09, 9:18 pm)

That's true. Nowadays I'm encountering more vocabulary i don't know, which leads to more context i do not know yet. A newspaper is definitely made up of vocab i probably never even heard of(yet). In terms of kanji. I want to aim around 3000 kanji. But it's not the kanji, it's the vocab of those particular kanji+ there context that will take time to reach a certain high level of proficiency or fluency in terms of reading+understanding those contexts.

@Womacks23
When you say broad enough knowledge, i presume you mean you can figure out what's going on in terms of context by knowing those "1000 characters" right?

Sorry I was misleading. You need about 1000 kanji and the vocabulary to read a paper, and depending on circumstances, may or may not find it difficult. The moral of the story is that you don't "need" so many characters to read Japanese.

"According to a study by the National Language Research Institute, the 500 most often kanji represent roughly 80% of the kanji found in newspapers, and 94% of newspaper kanji can be covered by 1,000 characters. In accordance with this finding, mastery of the 1,200 kanji in Levels 1-3 of this text makes for a broad, adequate knowledge of kanji. If level 4 kanji are also mastered, then the only kanji remaining are those which are rarely used. In fact, study up through Level 3 (or, depending on the circumstances, up through Level 4), should give you a more or less sufficient knowledge of kanji and useful vocabulary. All you need to do for the next step is to naturally increase this knowledge by actually reading newspaper and magazine articles and books related to your interests or field of study."

Kanji in Context - Introduction

Last edited by Womacks23 (2010 February 09, 9:40 pm)

I don't know where that 2042 figure comes from. 常用(1945) + New 常用　(191) = 2136.
That's probably sufficient for understanding mostly everything. 1000 is definitely not enough to read a newspaper. As Mezbup said, 95% doesn't mean much.

ta12121 wrote:

@Womacks23
But yea it's definitely a vocab thing, not so much a knowledge of kanji. Although you need both in order to get to a high level of reading, such as newspapers+news itself.

I think that's a very balanced statement.

On the contrary, i'm finding news isn't really a high level of reading perse. If you know the news specific words that get used a lot and the grammar structures which repeat over and over and over then it's no trouble.

I think half the problem broad sweeping generalisations about kanji knowledge is it misses out a few important factors, one of which is some vocab that use a simple kanji in the 1000 most common range may also use another kanji which is outside that range. 彗星 for example uses a really simple, common kanji 星 but also uses a rare as hell one. So yeah, my point is you gotta balance in quite a few factors.

Just get reading the news every day and it gets easier and easier, trust me!

The Wikipedia frequency count is even more useful than the newspaper one because it encompasses so many different types of writing on many different subjects, and the statistics were pretty similar to newspapers:
These are the statistics quoted:
173 kanji make up 50% all kanji in Wikipedia.
454 kanji cover 75% of all kanji in Wikipedia.
874 kanji cover 90%
1214 kanji cover 95%
2061 kanji cover 99%
2456 kanji cover 99.5%
3489 kanji cover 99.9%

I've said this before, but you're never going to learn every single character that you will ever see, nor will you ever get to say "OK, I'm done learning kanji."  The 800-1000 range should put you in a position where kanji are no longer a huge barrier to reading.  Of course that doesn't mean that you reach 800-100 and stop studying kanji.  You can never stop dealing with unknown kanji and readings no matter how much you study.

(As I've also said before, the Jouyou list itself is very arbitrary.  Even with the new additions, there are still a decent number of kanji on there I don't know, and a good number that aren't on there that I do know.)