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The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word ap
by diego 7y ago
The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence. For example, "son, if you go to the plumbf tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks."
98% is closer to what you need in order to read a text and have an idea of what's going on. See this article:
https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-comprehension-feels-like https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-...
- iflp 7y agoFor Japanese it can be different, as most structural words are in Kana, a phonogram, instead of in Kanji.
- huntedsnark 7y ago'Tosche Station' and 'power converters' obviously - see 90% is all I need!
- jacobolus 7y agoThis is why picture books are so important for improving listening comprehension for young children. It gives them something to focus on so that hearing words they don’t understand or new grammatical constructions is less distracting, it provides visual cues related to some of those words and helps guide understanding of the story, and it gives the children and whoever is reading to them something to point at in discussion. It also makes the stories more appealing and makes repeat readings more rewarding. 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.
- dredmorbius 7y agowhy picture books are so important Any references on this? Interesting.
- jacobolus 7y agoI am just talking about my own experience. But there are thousands of papers about early language development (which I have not read). You could start with a google scholar search like https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=storybook+OR+%22picture+book%22 https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=storybook+OR+%22picture...
- dredmorbius 7y agoOK. Was wondering if that was research based or just personal experience. The hypothesis makes sense, but I'd love to see it substantiated.
- kd5bjo 7y agoI’ve been looking into the research on second language acquisition a bit, and the primary mechanism for learning a language appears to be hearing/reading understandable sentences for content, rather than structure. When learning, some sentences in the text will make sense to you and others will be out of your reach. 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.
- rtpg 7y agoAs someone who barely scraped by the Kanji/readings of my N2 but have to do a chunk of my work in Japanese, I gotta disagree. 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.
- weinzierl 7y agoI 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.
- bubblewrap 7y agoI don't know what a N2 is either, but it seems obvious that it is some kind of course for learning Japanese or Kanji, and that he did poorly in it. That's good enough for me.
- y4mi 7y agoIn 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.
- Legogris 7y agoAnd 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.
- teawrecks 7y agoYou say that like it's a bad thing. I wish I could decipher that much of a random sentence in Japanese. At least then I can ask about the parts I don't know. And for most people learning Japanese, they'll probably already know the word in hiragana or katakana, knowing kanji is just icing on the cake.
- ignoranceprior 7y agoJust out of curiosity, how many kanji would you need to know for 98% coverage? Edit: Doh, the OP link actually includes this statistic.
- coldtea 7y ago>The thing is, 90% coverage is not that great. What happens is that you understand common words that make up for a lot of structure, but when an uncommon word appears it's probably important to the sentence. If you have 90% you can more often than not guess the uncommon word...
- kazinator 7y agoThat's if you know 90% of the words. If you recognize 90% of the kanji and know what they mean, that's not the same as knowing words.
- coldtea 7y ago>That's if you know 90% of the 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 7y agoI'm also talking about recognizing 90% in whatever text you're reading, not about knowing 90% of the lexicon! My point is that those characters aren't words. Well, some of them are, sometimes.
- GuB-42 7y agoI noticed that it takes very little to understand what a conversation is about, but understanding the specifics is a different story entirely. 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.
- fenomas 7y ago> 90% coverage is not that great ... when an uncommon word appears 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.
- WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 7y agoBeing fluent in Japanese as a second language, I agree with this. It's Zipf's law and sounds great, but 90% isn't as useful as it sounds. You'll mostly recognize a single common Kanji of compound words consisting of 2-3 characters, or common structural words. It's a far cry from being able to understand content you find in the wild. 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.
- WnZ39p0Dgydaz1 7y agoAfterthought: Kawaii (cute) is actually 可愛い, also containing "可", which literally may mean something like "a thing that can be easily loved", or simpler, cute. But you wouldn't be able to guess that if you just know the Kanji.
- Freak_NL 7y agoPerhaps not the best example. Knowing that 可 is usually read 'ka' in compound words, and that 愛 is read as 'ai', you get to 'ka-ai-i', at which point the meaning of 愛 (love) will likely push you to かわいい (kawaii).
- make3 7y agoespecially since it's the highest entropy words that are missing, by definition... so you always get hit the hardest
- gibolt 7y agoIt is easy to lookup or ask the meaning of the 1-3 words you don't know in a sentence. It is best to always have some percentage of the content not be what you know, otherwise you will plateau. 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.
- Legogris 7y agoI don't have sources for this, but I am quite sure that 90% coverage of kanji occurrences will give you >98% comprehension coverage. (Here I make the assumption that you'd know all the readings and all but obscure or archaic words for a kanji to count)
- nxpnsv 7y agoYour example is more like 85% coverage. Not that it changes your point much.
- krilly 7y agoYour example is too convenient. How about "son, if you go to the butcher tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks." With a bit of context it's usually easy to figure out the missing parts
- furyofantares 7y ago> son, if you go to the plumbf tomorrow morning don't forget to pick up some zlonks 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-of-jawn-philadelphias-allpurpose-noun https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-enduring-mystery-o...
- Shorel 7y agoWe use 'vaina' for the same jawn in Bogotá. Vaya mañana a la vaina esa y me trae la vaina. Sabe qué, dejémonos de vainas.
- Shorel 7y agoIn fact, we also have another word that serves both as a multipurpose substantive and an multipurpose adjective: "¿Yo dónde dejé esa chimba?" "Está muy chimba su carro" "Esa chimba estaba muy chimba"
- Shorel 7y agoBut in what order will you learn all the 99% (10k? 20k?) words? 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!
- hodgesrm 7y agoThis. I peaked at about 1000 kanji in active memory. It was still not enough to read newspapers easily. Joyo kanji ("regular use Chinese characters") have about 2100 characters, which any high school grad should be able to read. Anything much below that level and you are guessing/looking up a lot of content. You are better off trying to cover specific domains. I was able to read technical articles related to hardware and software topics pretty easily.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nikodunk 7y agoI laughed so hard at your great example and read it to all my friends sitting in the room.
- WalterBright 7y agoI would agree with that. I know about 1000 German words, and that covers the bulk of words people use when speaking German, but not the words that matter.