By the way, if I sounded anything like "You need 3000 Kanji to read Souseki or you're screwed!!", nothing could be further from the truth. I began to read "I am a cat" just the other day and it's going smooth so far. Just read stuff you enjoy and Kanji learning will take care of itself.

@Fillanzea It does seem like this debate will never die.

I'll repost this if you allow me:

Fillanzea wrote:

I went googling around for data and hit upon this very interesting link:

http://www.nier.go.jp/homepage/jouhou/system/rep10.html

They ran textual analysis on a number of generalist nonfiction books. The number of individual kanji in each book ranged from 958 to 2206, with most falling around the 1400-1700 range (the average was 1472). The 40 books together used a total of 3,836 kanji. On average, each book used 1,288 Jouyou kanji, so 87.5% of the kanji used were Jouyou. However, that jumps up to an average of 98% if you count each individual instance of kanji usage. (e.g. book #3 had 37088 total instances of kanji, of which 36870 were Jouyou.) One book used 621 non-Jouyou kanji, but the average was 184.3.

The major outlier in difficulty, made up of only 92% Jouyou kanji, was 故事成語, which means "Idioms derived from historical events or classical literature of China." Well, yes, I would expect that to have a ton of non-Jouyou kanji.

My reading of the statistics is that they align very well with what yudan taiteki has been saying: you can read a great deal with about 1400-1700 kanji, and once you reach a baseline of somewhere around there, it's helpful for further learning to be driven by the fields you're actively studying or have an interest in. Because certainly "Idioms derived from Chinese literature" is going to have a different base of vocabulary than "The psychology of drinking alcohol."

mezbup wrote:

Personally I'm aiming for a very high level of reading, I don't see the point in aiming low.
Why the hell not be able to read 3000 kanji?

Where does this 3000 number come from, though?  3000 isn't even half of the kanji that are displayable on computers with the JIS1 and 2 level, so you still might see characters on the Internet that you don't know.  And even if you learn those 6500 or so kanji, the Kanjigen dictionary has over 12,000 characters and Morohashi over 50,000, so you still might encounter some characters you don't know.

The point in "aiming low" is that, as I have said before, there is a serious problem of diminishing returns with kanji study.  The more kanji you study, the less useful each new kanji is, and the harder it is to learn them because you don't have the constant reinforcement you have with more common kanji.  I don't see the point of wasting time learning thousands of kanji that cover less than 1% of the kanji appearing in written material when you could just be reading instead.

Look, the point of the OP is basically this: I'm assuming that there is a certain set of kanji readings common to the most basic reading material: newspapers, cooking directions, maps, advertisements, magazine articles and other light reading.  I'm also assuming that there are a ton of other, much less common, readings one would need for the more difficult reading: literature, especially pre-war, technical articles, even names.  Where one draws the line between the two sets is a matter of opinion and judgment, but at the least it seems like a real range of numbers could be decided upon. 

For instance, Schultz of Kanji Damage goes out of his way to point out a number of readings which are (to him) effectively useless.  In my mind, I can see how there would be plenty of readings which may not be totally useless, but at least not worth learning before other, more elementary, readings.  I admit, in the long run, it is not a question of limitation.  One must be able to read a lot of kanji and the fewer you know, the less you can read.  But what is the point of being able to read 1000s of literature-only kanji when you can't even read a bus schedule?  It's only relevant to the beginning stages only, but so is RTK.

I wonder if it isn't about time for some computer geniuses to come up with a new RTK and/or RTK Lite, not based on KO2001 or JLPT or smart.fm, but on light novels and suchlike. Or at least treat 常用/newspaper-frequency stuff as a subset. If you determine the core most frequent kanji and vocabulary from there, then that might be a better foundation of readings to work from, needing only to learn individual kanji+readings extemporaneously from there. I'm but a simple person, so my brain hurts when I try to think about running those scripts people use for analysis.

Mezbup, this info on old Jouyou (1947) might interest you. It was posted by Jarvik7 or JimmySeal (I think) ages ago. The more common characters tend to have the higher number of readings.

1On:0Kun    664     34%
1On:1K       635     32.6%
1On:2K       228     11.7%
2On:1K        91        4.7
1On:3K        76        3.9
2On:0K        71        3.7
2On:2K        53        2.7
Other          129      6.6 (iirc, there's about 90 kun only characters?)

On reading unsimplified texts in a foreign language for pleasure: This article is about vocab needed by ESL learners reading for pleasure. It touches on some things you guys were discussing though.

If I'm not mistaken, I think Kanji Jiten colour codes by level (elementary/middle/high) the character itself is introduced and level at which other readings are later added. It also gives a sample common word. But it's not in a list form, afaik.

It's a good site for all kinds of kanji info: New Jouyou list updates, history of name kanji changes, difficult readings, categorized by topic, radical info, kanken 1&2 lists?, etc.

Jajaan, Womacks32's "Kanji in Context" suggestion also seems like a good one. You could use the vocab only list that's floating around and for each of the first 1400(?) kanji in KIC order, pick a word for each reading. (The less common and atypical readings are marked in the book). That would give you a bare minimum vocab list that covers the common readings. (The complete list is close to JLPT1's I think ~9000)

Those numbers are interesting.

That article was a great read, basically confirmed a lot of what we've been talking about.  A lot of the points I was making are in there. The thing I was most interested to read about was at which point a learner can tackle a novel and not have the level of difficulty be overwhelming. They note that the standard 2000 word geeral service English vocabulary isn't enough. Hmm I wonder the numbers for Japanese? I presume they would come up similar.

Anyway the "arbitrary" 3000 number is based directly on kanken 1.5kyuu. Because out of the 700+ kanji in that level, those are the ones most likely to pop up in novels and other higher level reading, even video games. It's not arbitrary at all I don't think, if you take a look at the kanji on that list it's actually a list worth knowing how to read. In terms of the actual test, kanken likes to test done crazy and obscure vocab sometimes and especially at the higher level but if you strip that way and take those 700+ kanji you'll find some pretty useful stuff.

Also people bear in mind my only method for learning kanji these days is through vocab I pick up through copious amounts of reading. So by the time i've even learned to read 3000 kanji, my vocab for all the jouyou will be very substantial and that's where the biggest benefit will come.

Native speakers of a language usually don't know a rather large portion of the words in a college level book (even when they are at the height of vocabulary that they will know in their life time).  Of course, it's less than 1% of the words in the book.  But native speakers don't even notice when they read, because once your vocabulary level is high enough you just gloss over words you don't know and get the meaning from the other words.  You don't 'guess from context' what the meaning of the word you don't know is.  Rather, you 'guess from context' the overall meaning and ignore the words.

Once you get to know about 9,000 vocabulary words down pat, you should be able to start doing this quite often automatically in a foreign language as well.   (I don't know of any direct empirical ways that this has been tested.  However, there's a professor of linguistics at a university in Kyoto that has made examples of academic texts in English which only display the most 9000 common words.  The rest of the words are replaced with blanks.  With just 9,000 words the text is quite easy to read despite what is missing, but at 7,000 words it is still pretty difficult).

I think that this has some relevance when considering the importance of lesser-used kanji.

this topic is really subjective.

really subjective..........
To be honest, you will never know all the readings for everything in japanese. But i do understand that there should be a point where majority of everything. Around 95% you can understand+read almost everything. The other 5% for words that you do not know. It's a never ending journey. I doubt anyone hear wants to learn 1 million english words or so. You do not ever need that amount. So in the long run it's all subjective. Aim for the amount that is necessary for you're situation. If it's fluency you're aiming for, then yes large amounts of kanji+readings are necessary. (2000-3000 should be enough, more than enough for general things). If you're aiming for upper-level fluency. Like native-ability (i.e. same as native speaker, or even better). Then yes aim higher. 3000+

(Disclaimer: I have no idea what I'm talking about)

Readings for individual kanji are useless, because you will never be able to reliably decide which reading is apt for each kanji as you read them. Readings for compounds (actual vocab) are what matter, because those readings are set (for the most part).

To paraphrase a quote from The Fifth Element:

Readings not important. Only vocab important.