/jp/ - Otaku Culture

[Anonymous No.]

How many Kanji do you know /jp/ ?
I'm at about 180 and I'm kind of struggling.
I hear you need like at least 600 for basic reading levels.

[Anonymous No.]

Probably around 1800.

[Sakura !RAILgUnr8s No.]

I don't know. 200 maybe?

[Anonymous No.]

I don't know shit, because I'm not a faggot.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151062
I'm going to call Shenanigans on this.
Guys, I call shenanigans on this.

[Anonymous No.]

Gave up at about 120, if it takes a Japanese child years and years to learn the 1000 most used it'd take me like 10 years.

[Anonymous No.]

0.

[Arcueid Brunestud !ARCIkc4cG6 No.]

>>6151069

Accepted.

You have called TOTAL FUCKIN SHENS on that dude. We acknowledge that you have called Shenanigans on this man, and mark him as such.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151067

[Anonymous No.]

You count how many words you can read?

[Anonymous No.]

1,932.

[Anonymous No.]

Why can't they just have a normal fucking alphabet?
Inconsiderate tally-whackers.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151076
damnnnnn

this guy just owned all of your asspies butts

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151072
Chenanigans?

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151069
http://kanjidamage.com/japanese_symbols/
Follow it up with reading and 1800 is easy.

[Arcueid Brunestud !ARCIkc4cG6 No.]

>>6151087
>>6151087

Mad Chens.

[Arcueid Brunestud !ARCIkc4cG6 No.]

>>6151092

longchen is loooooooooooooooooong

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151087
What.........

[Anonymous No.]

1k+ something. Still learning.

You hit the wall only if:
[] you are a buttmad autist emoshitposter
[] you don't have enough dedication
Pick one.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151089
1 一 one(line radical)
2 二 two
3 三 three
4 了 total
5 子 child
8 姦 rape

There's something fishy going on here..........

[Anonymous No.]

At least 1,945.
I'll admit that maybe around 1/3 of the kanji that I "know", I can't really comfortably handwrite from memory.

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

Around 1000, I've started focusing more on grammar and listening rather than grinding out 1000 more kanji.

[Anonymous No.]

Errr, I can't write hardly any, mainly because my handwriting in English alone is terrible and I have a crappy memeory. I can read quite well enough though to be able to read Japanese and use common sense to piece in other bits.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151101
I don't think it matters. Most of us just want to play some eroge and maybe watch some anime, so it's not like we need to be able to write them. A waste of time, considering the only use of learning it would be to more securely brag about how many kanji you know.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151104
If you "grind" them out anyway you'd only just forget the older ones.

[Anonymous No.]

Computers have made writing obsolete.

[Anonymous No.]

500

[Anonymous No.]

Can't you see that I am a Pioneer.....

[Anonymous No.]

Kanji are used as morphemes. Studying them in isolation is retarded, as is claiming to 'know' them. What do people mean by 'knowing' kanji?

Knowing how to write them? Useless to a foreigner unless you live in Japan.

Knowing their broad overall meaning(s)? EDICT usually gives a half dozen often disparate suggestions for each, and they all tend fall apart or become extremely obtusely applied in the context of actual words, setting aside even obvious examples like ateji.

Pronunctiation? There's usually two or three On readings at minimum on top of native Japanese words as well as the occasional anomolies that derive from neither. Totally unreliable and unworth studying in isolation.

Exhaustively knowing all the various combinations and okurigana comprising actual Japanese words? This is surely the most accomplished if not immediately practical path as it actually constitutes learning the language instead of simply dickwaving arbitrary numbers on the Internet, but I don't think anyone who counts the number of kanji they know to a semi-finite value actually does this.

So that leaves the conclusion that counting the number of kanji you 'know' is actually vacuous wankery and hardly related to measuting one's understanding of the language at all. So why do these threads keep happening?

[Anonymous No.]

Kanji are used most commonly as morphemes. Studying them in isolation is retarded, as is claiming to 'know' them. What do people mean by 'knowing' kanji?

Knowing how to write them? Useless to a foreigner unless you live in Japan.

Knowing their broad overall meaning(s)? EDICT usually gives a half dozen often disparate suggestions for each, and they all tend fall apart or become extremely obtusely applied in the context of actual words, setting aside even obvious examples like ateji.

Pronunctiation? There's usually two or three On readings at minimum on top of native Japanese words as well as the occasional anomolies that derive from neither. Totally unreliable and unworth studying in isolation.

Exhaustively knowing all the various combinations and okurigana comprising actual Japanese words? This is surely the most accomplished if not immediately practical path as it actually constitutes learning the language instead of simply dickwaving arbitrary numbers on the Internet, but I don't think anyone who counts the number of kanji they know to a semi-finite value actually does this.

So that leaves the conclusion that counting the number of kanji you 'know' is actually vacuous wankery and hardly related to measuting one's understanding of the language at all. So why do these threads keep happening?

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151136
I studying in compounds is so great, how come no one actually does it? I've never heard any success stories from a foreigner studying Japanese using that method (and I've heard many from people studying them in isolation), and I know for a fact that Japanese schools teach them in isolation. Let me tell you why it doesn't work: When you look a word containing multiple kanji, and you don't know any of the kanji, it's impossible to internalize, there's too much information to stick to your brain at once, unless you have photographic memory or something. So obviously what you do is break them down, taking one kanji at a time, and if you want to save some time. Which is the same as studying in isolation. It's the same thing if you want to learn to read and write Western languages, you have to learn the alphabet before even trying, even though that gives you no hint of the meaning of the word, and the pronunciation they tell you has millions of exceptions, because if you're not able to break it down to its smallest parts first, whole words will just look like a random scribble to you.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151156
Good job replying to kopipe dumbass.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151136
だが習った後、大部分は小説やゲームで磨きをかけた。
こんなのは普通じゃないか。

[Anonymous No.]

I spoke Japanese as my first language but I never bothered learning any Kanji once I started going to public schools in the US. I can read a lot of them basically because I sort of know them, and I can infer their meaning based on the context they're used in.

If all you want to do is get by with basic skills then thats about all you'll need. If you want to be able to read advanced material or live and work in Japan then you need to dedicate yourself to studying. Literally sit there and practice writing for 30-60 minutes a day like grade school children do in Japan and you should be fine in 5-10 years.

As a side note, my mother still carries around a pocket dictionary because she'll come across some really technical or obscure Kanji and can't figure out what it means, and she has been reading/speaking the language her entire life.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151156
I used that method
I started reading VNs after a bit less than 1 year studying japanese.
It works.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151197
This is the method kanjidamage suggests right?

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151156
>I studying in compounds is so great, how come no one actually does it?

As far as I'm aware, that's pretty much the default. The few college-level textbooks and their corresponding workbooks I've seen all contain lists of actual usable vocabulary and not isolated characters. Your experiences with other people are clearly skewed and unsubstantiated, so I won't venture there. Japanese schools teach Kanji progressively to match children's expected ability with the language and Japan's nationalistic sense of identity mandates an educational fixation on beating them into kids regardless of the practical merit, so that would happen anyhow. Moreover they're already broadly familiar with the language and encountering them in text to begin with, so effectively they're working backward. At most it's a refinement of their existing knowledge of the language or else it's a cultural excercise. It isn't at all analogous to a foreigner using knowledge of 1900+ kanji as a mandatory stepping stone to actually learning the language.

>taking one kanji at a time, and if you want to save some time. Which is the same as studying in isolation

That isn't the same at all. In that case you're learning words first and kanji secondarily as needed. Learning with an immediate practical application toward being able to read the language accurately trumps staring at grammatically hollow symbols to come to a loose understanding of what they might hypothetically may or may not mean outside of genuine context when you some day encounter them in text. The connections you make between kanji recurring in words will be much more precise than rote memorization of their English meanings, and much more natural than clumsy RTK anecdotes. It's how Japanese people actually learn when they aren't having it crammed down their throats in class, that is, it's learning by doing.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151156

>It's the same thing if you want to learn to read and write Western languages, you have to learn the alphabet before even trying,

(Quasi-)ideographic characters are not nearly the same thing as an alphabet. More comparable is to say you need to sit down and study charts of thousands of Latin and Greek morphemes before you're allowed to look at written English. It's not practical and it holds any kind of value as an educational tool for very few people. It's a distraction.

[Anonymous No.]

like 900-1100, gonna finish out the last 7-900 or whatever then focus completely on grammar and compounds. Studying kanji together, when you dont fucking know what they mean, is retarded, and you should be killed for suggesting it.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151206
>is retarded, and you should be killed for suggesting it.

I like how you fleshed out your polite disagreement with rational thinking, substantiation and informed dissent. It gives me a lot of faith in your alternate point of view and makes me reconsider.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151204
I think there's some confusion here on what exactly is meant by "isolated". What I mean is simply acknowledging a kanji as a seperate entity from the word it is in, and thus something worth studying in itself, since it will most likely serve as building blocks for many words that have nothing in common except sharing that kanji. I don't mean trying to avoid ever seeing any kanji in context until you have finished studying 2000 of them.

What I consider ideal is learning them separately, but always having some notes on where it's actually used in practice. This means both learning them in a way that can be applied practically right away, and learning them in a quantifiable and countable way.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151236

Sorry, that's an extreme I draw from the RTK users. Though, I don't think the lesser approach of picking individual kanji away to study is worthwhile either though, for the reasons above in the post the one poster misidentified as copypasta (It wasn't). They're evenly as misleading as they are helpful, and they're only helpful as a fallback to not recognizing a new word, and when you learn words, you learn new kanji as you re-encounter the characters in different compounds. So diverting time towards studying kanji in isolation rather than learning actual vocabulary is as much creating the problem that it aims to help with. Concentrating on learning Japanese words kills two birds with one stone.

[Anonymous No.]

So basically, everyone agrees that kanjidicks rules and RTK has problems.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151251
Well, it'd be pretty ideal if you could just learn two kanji in one by studying a compound with two kanji, but I still stand by what I said previously about them not sticking this way. I've tried studying this way many times before, but it's just impossible to remember if you try to study a significant amount of them. Besides, it's still very common for me to encounter a kanji I have never seen before, but it's very rare to see a compound I know all the kanji in without being able to accurately guess the meaning of it (I'll usually invest some time in looking it up to confirm, but after that, it'll stay in my memory permanently, since it's so easily associated with something I already know, rather than starting from scratch).

[Anonymous No.]

My known vocabulary covers requires about 2350 to write.

I don't really memorise kanji though.. just recognise words.

[Anonymous No.]

My known vocabulary requires about 2350 to write.

I don't really memorise kanji though.. just recognise words.

[Anonymous No.]

About 300 now.

I'm using the Heisig method, so I don't know the readings yet, but I can write them from memory with correct stroke order (and the other way around, also). This is over the course of a few months and me slacking off a lot (not studying them every day, etc).

If you mean how many I know all readings for, that'd be zero.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6151064
>I don't know.
http://www.mlcjapanese.co.jp/LevelCheck/kanji.htm

[Anonymous No.]

>>6153129
According to that site, about 150. That's what I was thinking when I saw this thread last night.

[Anonymous No.]

RTK is like an overpowered sword you can get in the beginning of a game by doing a sidequest. At first you will be be lagging behind because it takes a while to get that sword but once you have it you rape everything and catch up quite quickly.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6153129
Hmm, I recognised all the kanji there, but didn't know the readings for 18 of the words. Something new to learn!

A more important measure is, how many words does anonymous know?

[Anonymous No.]

>>6153129
380-400
Hahaha, that's bullshit, I only know about 100 at most.

[Anonymous No.]

The thing I hate about learning Japanese is that it's the most boring grindfest. It's like one big memory excercise. They should just adapt the damn alphabet and forget about those thousands of obscure symbols.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6153129
1500-1600
I still need to memorize most advanced vocabulary, but since with dictionaries I can basically manage everything but the most convoluted stuff I kinda lost the "I need to grind more to be ale to understand" motivation.
I'm just sitting on what I've already learned and play eroge veryday. After a while you begin recognizing words you didn't know before, but it's not tha same as studying them. It's like you're using instinct to know what a word is instead of memory. It's weird.

[Anonymous No.]

I signed up for the JLPT1 test this December under the premise that the grammar, kanji and listening is pretty ok for me.

My reading is still kind of shitty, though, and I'm too lazy to really practice much.

[Anonymous No.]

For someone learning Japanese on their own, would learning the Kanji be a good start?

[Anonymous No.]

All the relevant ones pretty much. No problem reading but have a hard time remembering what Kanji each word uses when I try to reproduce them. Two years Chinese at College helped a lot.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6153378
I'd say learn Hiragana and Katakana first. Being able to read at least SOMETHING will probably give you more motivation than grinding kanji from the start. You will also be able to use rikaichan which gives readings in hiragana.

[Anonymous No.]

around 660-675 I think. I need to pick up the pace.

[Anonymous No.]

If your goal is to read VNs (like mine is, I recently found myself wanting to play an untranslated game again and am trying to pick Japanese up again after giving up before) I don't see the point of learning kanji first; the thing is, kanji/compounds are the easiest thing to look up with whatever your choice of translation program is. Grammar is the tricky part because machine translation fails hard at it, plus Japanese grammar rarely translates perfectly into English. If you know the grammar thoroughly, then all it takes is a quick mouseover with rikaichan (or whatever) and you've got the line translated. I suppose if you do this long enough eventually you'll start picking up a bunch of compounds. On the other hand, knowing the kanji/compounds with no/minimal grammar knowledge leaves you scratching your head trying to parse the sentence structure (and heaven forbid the sentence is filled with hiragana-only words mixed with the grammar).

I did go and try grinding kanji for a while, and got about 100 (of course the fucking rankings of most-frequently-used kanji always use newspapers, so the list is filled with political- and business-related kanji that I'll never use), but then I decided it was a waste of time when I could be learning compounds in practice.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6153448
I know my grammar well enough to play most simple VNs, and use rikaichan to look up words I don't know, so I can say for sure that it's true that if you can only have one , it's better to have grammar, but you definitely want to have both. It will be really frustrating when you don't understand a single word and have to go through a really long sentence with only your grammar knowledge. And you won't automatically pick up words this way, since it's way too easy to just use rikaichan to pay enough attention to the words to internalize them. You have to be conscious of the whole process, try to read first, and then look up what you didn't understand.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6153378
Yeah but if it's taking up a lot of your time, don't bother learning to write thousands. Just recognition is enough.

When are you ever going to have to write with pen and paper in Japanese? The moment you stop practicing writing you'll forget it, so why bother anyway.

[Anonymous No.]

[Anonymous No.]

>>6153321
If I am thinking correctly jlpt1 is the hardest right?
goodluck.

[Anonymous No.]

>>6153448
It's frustrating. Sure I can get through entire vn's like that but most of the time my head just starts hurting because of the speed/annoyance of it all and I stop.