When I was learning English, the most memorable/epic lesson of advanced English I ever took was trying to understand what we were told was an "advanced" poem; the Jabberwock!

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?

Australian here. I studied it in school and so have my kids. They were equally amazed at how much meaning they could bestow on the words.

Yes. We even did a similar exercise in my class.

GEB by Douglas Hofstadter has an interesting section on translations of the Jabberwocky http://www76.pair.com/keithlim/jabberwocky/poem/hofstadter.h...

I don't disagree with your point in general but the irony is that your first sentence is an excellent demonstration of the parent comments point.

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.

And still you're fluent in English (I assume) - it's not an issue with the English language but your understanding of the context. Japanese (and Chinese) work a bit differently than latin languages. Even if you know 100% of the kanji (very few Japanese people do), it doesn't mean you know 100% of the words - and vice versa. Since the characters are idiomatic, it also makes it easier to guess the meaning of a word or character you don't know than if they would have been written out phonetically.

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.

> Since the characters are idiomatic, it also makes it easier to guess the meaning of a word or character you don't know than if they would have been written out phonetically.

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

I had a feeling I was not using the right word, thanks for pointing out :)

> "N2 is generally attained after 1-2 years of Japanese studies"

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.

Oh yeah, I definitely meant full-time studies coupled with practice outside of study-hours.

I think your estimate for N2 is a bit too optimistic: passing it in two years would be very difficult without living in Japan.

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

Surely no one knows all the Kanji, since some of them have open academic investigation whether they even are a valid character or not?

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

No one knows "all Kanji" much like no one knows "all English words" even in native English-speaking countries.

Do kanji handwriting-recognition models even “know” (i.e. are trained on) all in-use kanji, or do they just not bother with some of the rarest ones because their presence in the dataset would decrease the likelihood of correctly matching more-common characters, which it’s overwhelmingly-likely are what you’re writing?

Presumably it's the same as words in English, where you'd never make a word suggestion model that just blindly considers all possible words. You swipe jow or gow and it will change it to "how" despite the other two existing in arguably correct English in some very obscure case.

Indeed. Which means if your goal is fluency, it's silly to strive for 100.0%.

I think even if you reach the parent comment's 98% point, "N2" will not appear there. But 90% English is probably good enough to be able to reason "N2 must be some kind of level".

I've personally always advised my students to increase difficulty once they've reached 87.5% accuracy.

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

Exactly. You need to be in the zone of proximate development or learning isn’t very efficient. I remember as a teen I had a fixed mindset and would get 100% on every calculus test. The problem became that I liked getting a perfect so much that ended up actively avoiding harder material and just sticking with what I was taught in school. I was afraid of posing interesting problems to my self out of fear that I wouldn’t be able to answer them.

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.

In case someone else wants to know:

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.

I thought his first sentence made his point. I didn't know what an N2 was either, but from the context I thought it could be some kind of test he barely passed.

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.

> the irony is that your first sentence is an excellent demonstration of the parent comments point

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 agree with rtpg on this one - and disagree with the Diego.

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.

>> 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.

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).

Tend to agree with you. Context is important.

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.