Sure, reading isolated sentences with only 90% coverage is really hard sometimes. But usually you're reading whole blocks of text, so you have context. Also, maybe you don't know some kanji but it has similar radicals to other, so you can make educated guesses (only sometimes of course).

I mean it's just like English! There are radicals/etymological clues, there are context clues, there's so much that you can work off of to figure things out. And exercising "figuring things out with partial information" is a valuable skill that can compensate for a lot of missing kanji knowledge.

An aside: I've heard that when learning a language, you should be able to understand roughly 80% of what you're reading/listening to, because then you'll have enough of a base to not feel overwhelmed, while still having new stuff to absorb.

We were a class of 6-8 students, in pairs making our guesses of what the words that we didn't "understand" meant. We all got pretty advanced ideas and all got to similar conclusions. The teacher would tell us afterwards how those were made up words, and we were all in awe at how much we still understood and agreed upon the meaning of the words.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jabberwocky

Sidequestion, is this poem taught in schools in the US by any chance?

I have no clue what a "N2" is and I'm not entirely sure what you meant by "Kanji/readings". There are only six other sentences of context and they didn't really help to understand the first one.

Kanji: The Chinese characters in question

N2: The second highest level of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT). N1 is by many seen as a very high bar and many Japanese employers demand it if you'll be using Japanese as your main working language. N2 is generally attained after 1-2 years of Japanese studies.

Ideographic, as in trying to portray ideas graphically, not idiomatic, as in using expressions like a native speaker

From my own experience, this would only be true in the most favorable of the situations. 2 years studying fulltime while living in Japan sounds about right. 1 year studying as a hobby few hours a week, no way.

For context, it took me 3 years of university (outside Japan) to pass N2.

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2018/10/29/language/ghost-...

(I'm just amused of all the % thrown around I this thread)

This is a dangerous and corrosive mindset that did a lot of harm to me and other people I know. It took me maybe until 25 to actually start to accept my lack of knowledge and incompetence and start to do something with it. I sometimes wonder what my life would be like if I had the emotional maturity to challenge myself at a young age instead of pursuing destructive perfectionism.

From a quick Google I gathered that there are 5 levels of proficiency you can certify with. They are N1 to N5, N1 is the highest rating.

Maybe whether one can make a reasonable guess depends on more than the context - perhaps background, experience, and point of view. I know I've missed points that are obvious to others because of our differing perspectives.

And allow me to claim that you've actually proved your parent's point! I have no idea what an "N2" is either but from the context was able to accurately guess that it's some kind of proficiency test.

I also read/type Japanese (my writing out of lack of continuing to write on a daily basis has gone to the dogs). With four years in Japanese universities and 20 years living in Japan I had the opportunity to experience what it is to get reasonably proficient in a second language.

The synaptic connections you can make by understanding 'most' of a compound kanji (multiple characters joined together) along with parts of the kanji makeup for a specific kanji you do not know puts you in an incredible position to figure out what the word is likely to mean.

Regardless, once you Japanese gets to a point, you begin to realise it is less about the meaning of words and more about the context and usage of language. You find yourself understanding how to use some words you have not studied without having said to yourself 'so what is this word equivalent in English' - and at times there is not a word equivalent in English. That is when you realise you are thinking in Japanese not just translating.

Synaptic connections, context and knowing what the relevant responses to how you want to respond are the key to fluency in my opinion. This is also the case for writing emails etc.

This also explains why people who do homestays where they get to watch people interact with each other progress faster than someone who goes to live with their significant other half. If you are involved in half of the interactions you get less opportunity to mimic the common responses.

Sorry for digressing a little on this one. Once you get that 777 kanji mark you would be well on your way to being able to contextually understand much more for the kanji/sentences you do not fully comprehend - which in turn leads to more kanji being 'gut-felt' understood if not fully formally learnt.

An additional benefit once you get some proficiency is that you can hear a word you do not know - but you can guess the half of the kanji being used in the compound word (and confirm by asking) and that gives you some context of what the word means. Very much like using latin/greek roots in English to breakdown words.

Time to go back to my coding before the day gets away from me. I just needed to respond to this one because I thought Diego's opinion on language learning was too far off the mark from my experience with it.

Funny as this is how I learned (and have similarly described) to read language X and it felt ___almost___ like zero resistance. I learned first just to identify each character by name, then somewhat how they were pronounced, then vowels, then how there were pronounced, then special rules for X, then special rules for Y.

All of the learning material clump them together from start, a few consonants, a few vowels, some of their properties, and rules on how to combine them. All at once, this made me ignore writing for years until I tried it my way which I think worked well (although it took some time, still).

If I hear something that amounts to "you idiot, get the schmonck out of my way", I'll understand even if I have no idea what "schmonck" really is.

Also, "understanding" a Kanji is an ill-defined term. Most Kanji have multiple meanings based on context, and many different readings. So for each Kanji you're not learning a single character, but possibly a lot more. Especially the Kanji that correspond to more abstract concepts you cannot learn by themselves. They don't have a concrete meaning like "eat" or "drink". You essentially have to memorize all of their word compounds, a single character does not help.

EDIT: I also started out learning Japanese by memorizing the top 2000 Kanji using Spaced Repetition. While it definitely helped, it wasn't nearly as useful as some of these marketing-driven sites want you to believe. Kanji meaning are too complex to be captured like that. Even if you "know" all Kanji in a word you'll likely not understand the word's meaning unless it's something simple and concrete. I think you are much better of memorizing and studying word compounds. Over time you will automatically "pattern match" the Kanji you see often to their abstract concepts.

Example from 1min of browsing a JP text: Take "可能" which is a very common word that usually means "possible". Knowing the two Kanji (tolerant and ability) it not going to help you. It could mean dozens of other things based on those simplified Kanji meanings. This is not an exception, the majority of words are like this. On the other hand, let me give you a bunch of words containing "可": 許可、可決、可能性、不可欠 (permission, approval, possibility, essential) and you start to pattern-match that "可" corresponds to something like "positive possibility", but it's hard to translate.

The "777 Kanji for 90% coverage" figure is probably more relevant for illiterate native speakers. Based on a corpus of 167,281 Japanese sentences I had segmented and lemmatized some time ago, you'd need 2,685 words for 90% (up to "故郷", "birthplace", usually written "ふるさと"), 6,564 for 95% (up to "すらり", "slender, smooth"), 14,098 words for 98% (up to "鼻先", "tip of the nose") and 20,657 words for 99% (up to "恐慌", "panic"). Obviously the exact numbers depend a lot on the diversity of the corpus, so don't mistake them for fixed targets to aim for.

You don't just load single words up into it and study them on their own, you load words, compounds, sentences, sentence fragments, radicals, etc. etc. and everything else you can, and the SRS system helps you study and remember it. I can understand SRS not being as useful to you if you were only using it for single characters.

You obviously learn it by itself but as Chinese words are mostly a combination of 2 characters, you immediately also have to learn e.g. 可以 (can, may, be able to), 可能 (maybe), 可爱 (cute) etc.

So someone who's learning characters in order to get 90% coverage (or whatever) would not simply learn characters but learn actual words. Learning characters in isolation would not be that helpful, indeed.

When you don't know a word (i.e. a combination) but you know the individual characters it is much easier to learn the new word either by guessing or checking.

In context, the meaning of 可爱 would be fairly straightforward to guess, for example. Even in English 'lovable' is a synonym of 'cute'.

To be honest this whole thread about 可愛い is more or less bonkers, because it's an ateji. The word's meaning doesn't derive from the characters, the characters got arbitrarily attached to an existing word because they were similar in sound and meaning.

As such, the whole thing is about as meaningful as talking about how easy it is to guess that 珈琲 means "coffee"...

In this case, though it does seem that the characters where chosen at least partly because of their actual meaning.

It seems that it is both an ateji and a jukujikun [1] because the word does not come from the characters but the characters do have the correct meaning.

[1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8F%AF%E6%84%9B%E3%81%84#J...

Nearly every word involving the kanji 可 in Japanese has something to do with permission: impossible (不可能), possible (可能), permission (許可), approval (可決), etc.

That said, the kanji-centric view of the world is ineffective, and one primarily adopted by beginner learners who have not spent any significant amount of time studying words in Japanese. It is always better to just learn words.

Sure, didn't I say they were in my post?

The point was, in a discussion of how well X predicts Y, it's not very useful to examine a test case where Y came first and X was chosen post-hoc to match it.

No, quite the opposite actually ;)

I do take your point that using that word in the discussion above, which is about Japanese was not the best example. On the other hand, it is a good example in chinese.

(B) By arbitrary here I mean that there is no linguistic connection. "Arbitrarily chosen because they are similar" => "chosen for no reason other than their similarity".

In Chinese, it can be further compounded into many common phrases:

可悲(pathetic, 可+'sad')

可气(annoying/irritating, 可+'anger')

可怜(pitiful, 可+'pity')

可恨(resentful, 可+'hate')

What would be a more suitable example would be 可(ke)乐(le) in my opinion, in which case it means Coke in Chinese, it is a transliteration.

But it could also be 'a thing that can be easily loved'. Rr simply, 'pleasing'. For example, 可口 means tasty. So, 可爱 could be understood in both ways actually.

Have you ever been around non-native students of Japanese? This is the one word that is pretty much guaranteed to be known by all with an interest in anything remotely Japanese.

Your point is valid, but kawaii is perhaps not the right example.

Most non-native students of Japanese will almost always encounter that word in hiragana, katakana, or even Romaji--encountering that as a kanji is actually remarkably rare.

The fact that the kanji for kawaii is an ateji makes it one of those odd ducks.

Interestingly, it's very common for students of Chinese. The word 可爱 (kě'ài, "cute") is dirt-common, but it isn't native to Chinese -- it originates as a loan from Japanese.

This isn't clear to the Chinese themselves, who use 卡哇伊 (kǎwāyī) if they want to refer to the Japanese word.

There's another modern word for cute, 萌 méng, which is also a loan from Japanese, though I think popular awareness of it as a weird loanword is higher, since its literal meaning ("sprout") is so far removed from the concept "cute".

Which is the trend with native Japanese people too.

I don't think anyone passingly familiar with Japanese thinks otherwise. That is, I think you're arguing against a position here that nobody actually holds. The argument for memorizing kanji is that it makes it easier to learn compound words, not that you'll just know them without learning them.

If you talk to people who don't know much about Japanese they often believe that memorizing the characters is the difficult part and doing so will help you understand a large fraction of written text. I think it's quite a common misconception.

[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/831167744

Even at the beginning, learning the simple kanji, having the vocabulary I knew/heard living in Japan associated to the kanji made it very useful from the start.

For anybody learning kanji with anki, etc. and failing, I recommend giving wanikani a try. I am just a happy user. Disclaimer: I live in Japan, work in a mixed English/Japanese environment and speak simple Japanese w/ my wife every day

TFA muddles this somewhat, but the research referred to has to do with coverage of kanji characters in a corpus text, not words. Someone who can read 90% of the kanji in a Japanese text might understand significantly more or less than 90% of the words, depending on the text.

Also notable: the research behind this was based on newspaper text corpora, which one could expect to have a lot of kanji and kanji compounds that are uncommon in casual usage.

I would guess (based on not-too-rigorous anecdotal experience) that the optimal level of word familiarity for most rapidly improving listening comprehension when read-to 1:1 is closer to 90% than 98% (but with the caveat that books should be re-read several times). The big difference is that having someone to talk to makes it very quick and easy to ask what words mean and discuss other aspects of the story.

When read to for an average of 1+ hour per day, young children improve at listening comprehension very quickly.

Any references on this? Interesting.

You could start with a google scholar search like https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=storybook+OR+%22picture...

Was wondering if that was research based or just personal experience. The hypothesis makes sense, but I'd love to see it substantiated.

I suspect that the role of pictures (or any other context) is to help correct your mental state of the narrative world so that the sentences you don’t understand don’t present an impassable barrier, preventing you from getting to the later sentences that will help you learn.

For example if you just understand the word "car" and the name of a place, it most likely is related to traffic. If that's coming from someone arriving late you can bet he is finding excuses ;)

That's a reason why you shouldn't bad mouth foreigners if they can hear you based on the premise that they don't understand the language. They may not be able to converse with you but they can still get the general idea.

As a counterpoint: “son, if you go to the jawn tomorrow morning, don’t forget to pick up some jawn”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-enduring-mystery-o...

"¿Yo dónde dejé esa chimba?"

"Está muy chimba su carro"

"Esa chimba estaba muy chimba"

Vaya mañana a la vaina esa y me trae la vaina.

Sabe qué, dejémonos de vainas.

I don't see anyone claiming: 'learn this 777 characters, and then STOP LEARNING'.

You learn the most frequent first. Then you start reading. Much easier than when you only understand 10% of the words.

So, you get to 90%. Then you read some text and you start to find new words from time to time. That's when you start using a dictionary.

Heck, I'm an avid reader and I am still finding new words (or old words with new meanings) in my native language!

If you are speaking/writing, much easier to form a sentence and search for the one word you don't know than search how to generate an entire sentence structure.

You are better off trying to cover specific domains. I was able to read technical articles related to hardware and software topics pretty easily.

(Here I make the assumption that you'd know all the readings and all but obscure or archaic words for a kanji to count)

With a bit of context it's usually easy to figure out the missing parts

Edit: Doh, the OP link actually includes this statistic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_jōyō_kanji

If you have 90% you can more often than not guess the uncommon word...

If you recognize 90% of the kanji and know what they mean, that's not the same as knowing words.

No, I'm taking about the premise of the article: if you know 90% of the words most widely used (that is, the above 777 characters for example). Not 90% of the words in general.

If you know the most likely words, you can more often than not guess the unknown words in a phrase from the context.

My point is that those characters aren't words.

Well, some of them are, sometimes.