Learning Japanese

[Izunera]

I Believe you can learn Japanese in Two Years Fluently if you study 100 Kanji a month.

100x12=1200
1200+1200=2400 Kanji

Some have learned fasTer.

You can learn all 2400 Kanji without even taking a class.

Just find a English- Japanese dictionary that has 3,000 Kanji and study. Give yourself a weekly quiz every friday.

Is it possiBle?

2400 Kanj= 5,000 words.

 

[Andromedashun]

What?
I owned a Japanese-Vietnamese dictionary with 1945 Kanji and the vocabulary already covered 11000 words.
And it's not likely that if you learned 2400 Kanji alone you can read and speak Japanese fluently. -_-

 

[Mike Cash]

Another person who doesn't realize the difference between "the Japanese language" and "the set of characters used to write the Japanese language"......

 

[FinancialWar]

I Believe you can learn Japanese in Two Years Fluently if you study 100 Kanji a month.

100x12=1200
1200+1200=2400 Kanji

Some have learned fasTer.

You can learn all 2400 Kanji without even taking a class.

Just find a English- Japanese dictionary that has 3,000 Kanji and study. Give yourself a weekly quiz every friday.

Is it possiBle?

2400 Kanj= 5,000 words.

yes it is possible. No need to learn 2400 Kanji, just learn the new Joyo kanji (2010) list which is 2136 kanjis (up from 1945 previously, this is kanken level 2) Joyo kanji list will cover you nearly 100 percent of the material. Anything more than 2136 will be Names or reference Kanji, not much use.

I am currently studying kanji from the ground up, learning about 100 kanjis a week. I am crossing learning with 现代汉语常用字表 (Chinese version of joyo kanji list sanctioned by PRC government) list which is 3500 (2500 primary for 98% coverage + 1000 secondary for 99.5%), so for each Kanji, I am learning kanji's Japanese meaning and Chinese meaning which most of the time is the same, Japanese writing (shinjitai) and Simplified Chinese variant (if there is one). Then Pinyin reading plus Onyomi. Lastly Kunyomi.

Currently studying around 50 to 100 kanjis a week depending on my time. I should be able to reach Kanken level 5 or 4 by the end this year. Level 2 this time next year. levels above level 2 IMO is not worth due to law of diminishing return.

Japanese joyo kanji +Chinese joyo list - characters same in both official list = around grand total 4000 characters.

You can do it by studying kanji once a week but you have to read constantly.

As other have said, kanji alone is not enough, but with a systematic way of studying will accelerate the Japanese learning process.

 

[ClarkH]

Fluency in a foreign language in 2 years from scratch seems pretty ridiculous and arrogant.

 

[nekojita]

Joyo kanji list will cover you nearly 100 percent of the material. Anything more than 2136 will be Names or reference Kanji, not much use.

This is really not true. The Joyo list serves its purpose, but its purpose is not to be a list of every kanji a foreigner needs to learn. I can think of plenty of kanji that I've seen, not in names or "reference" (whatever that means), but just in reading, that aren't joyo:
醤油、胡椒、栗、炒める、囁く、頷く

Newspapers don't even stick to the joyo.
Here are the 18 kanji that 朝日新聞, as of 2010 (according to wikipedia), treats "as joyo" although they're non-joyo:
磯（いそ） 炒（いた-める） 笠（かさ） 絆（きずな） 杭（くい） 釘（くぎ） 栗（くり） 捧（ささ-げる） 獅（シ） 哨（ショウ） 疹（シン） 蘇（ソ） 竪（たて） 杖（つえ） 辻（つじ） 扮（フン） 牢（ロウ） 禄（ロク）
Here are the 66 characters that they treat as non-joyo even though they're on the list (many of these are the recently added ones, or are somewhat obscure and limited in use, like 朕, or are kanji for words that are nowadays more often written in kana, like 又)
挨 曖 畏 彙 咽 鬱 畝 謁 艶 虞 苛 劾 蓋 顎 且 毀 僅 憬 梗 喉 傲 刹 拶 恣 摯 璽 羞 遵 凄 脊 羨 詮 箋 塑 遡 唾 堆 戴 但 綻 緻 嫡 捗 朕 椎 塡 貪 氾 汎 罷 膝 肘 附 訃 蔽 貌 昧 又 冶 瘍 沃 辣 濫 慄 弄 麓

That's not to say that this is then a better list of kanji or anything, because the flaw is with the idea that there's some list of kanji that everyone must learn and then you'll be able to understand everything.

Going through the Kanken is actually a reasonably good plan, since if you want to pass it you'll be forced to not just learn readings out of context but increase your vocabulary. I've played with Kanken DS. There's no way you'll pass something like 5級 just by learning "meaning" + "readings", you might be able to bluff your way to a pass for the reading section with decent guesses at on'yomi compounds, and the bits like asking about stroke order is easy enough, but you need a really solid vocabulary for the writing sections or you'll have no idea what word they're asking you for.

Example 5級 question would be something like supplying the right kanji for the bolded bits here:
指先でさわってテンジを読む
版画の作品をテンジする

You can't do that unless you know both words and recognise which goes in which context. Boosting your vocabulary up to that point is the tricky bit.

 

[FinancialWar]

if anyone have the new Joyo kanji list coverage please link it. I am pretty sure it's above 99 percent. I am certainly not going to spent my precious time learning another thousand kanji just boost coverage by a fraction of a percent.

Plus, the list is backed by the Japanese government, use of non-joyo usually have furigana, it is also the law to have furigana in newspaper for non-joyo. The new list was updated only 2 years ago, it is still in the process of being adopted. This new joyo list should be good for the next three decade or so.

Those 18 non-joyo you've provided are obviously outside the joyo coverage, their chance of occurrence negligible in Japanese, but most of them are in the Chinese Joyo hanzi list so I should have them cover too.

Of course one would have to study vocab simultaneously when studying kanji, it's part of "learning the kanji". I didn't mentioned it because it's just common sense.

 

[eeky]

2400 Kanj= 5,000 words.

How is that equation supposed to work?

 

[nekojita]

it is also the law to have furigana in newspaper for non-joyo

No, it is not. It is, I think, used to restrict the use of kanji in government documents/textbooks, but the joyo list is not legally binding for publishers and they only tend to use it as a guide. That is why things like the 新聞漢字表 exist - they are internal guidelines which differ from the joyo list, which newspaper publishers use. I'm not picking out those 18 kanji at random - those are the kanji that one particular (major) newspaper has picked as useful, and they're all Japanese. 炒める (stir-fry) and 栗 (chestnut) were both in my original list of useful non-joyo kanji I could think of, because you see them a lot in cooking/gourmet articles. 絆 has been pretty popular as a term recently, too. I recognise some of the others - not all, but they might be useful in specific contexts. They're not "chance of occurrence negligible", because they wouldn't bother to even come up with the list if they weren't using them regularly.

Here's wikipedia for you:

常用漢字表の目的は、漢字使用の目安であって制限ではないため、強制力を有するものではない。

As the aim of the joyo list is to provide a standard for kanji use, not a restriction, it has no force in law.

珍しい中国・東北部の家庭料理とは : グルメが何でぃ : フード＆スイーツ : グルメ : YOMIURI ONLINE（読売新聞）
- here's yomiuri putting furigana in brackets for some words (placenames, chinese terms), but not for 片栗粉 炒め 水餃子 or 醤油. Are you telling me they just forgot? No, it's because those terms are recognizable to the sort of people who read the gourmet section of the newspaper, so they don't need furigana.

if anyone have the new Joyo kanji list coverage please link it

Joyo coverage for what? It depends hugely on what you're reading.
菅氏「小沢氏の個利個略だ、呪縛から離れよ」 : 政治 : YOMIURI ONLINE（読売新聞）
In the first sentence of this (first thing on the front page, blergh, politics), there are no no-joyo outside names in the first sentence.
There are also no non-kyouiku outside names in the first paragraph
In the second (still ignoring names) there are four non-kyouiku, but joyo kanji: 離 and 縛, 呪 and 駒 (last two are on the new list)
In the third (just one sentence) there is one 及 which is not in the kyouiku but is in the joyo.
In the last there is 摘 and 陣, also 狙 (new list)

106 unique kanji in 354 characters
菅前小沢郎田 (6) only used in names, so 100 kanji used in words.
92 of those are within the 1006 教育漢字 (kyoiku).
8 of those are joyo but not kyoiku (half of them from the new list).

So yes, the joyo would cover everything in this particular document, but you don't need to learn over a thousand extra characters to pick up just those 8, do you? You can't say anything from this about how many of those joyo characters you wouldn't need to bother with to be able to read this, or . And I would argue that if you can't figure out the meaning of 指摘 from the context and some knowledge of 指, you're doing something wrong, so it's not as if it's as simple as "percentage of kanji you know in this article = percentage understanding of this article".

Let's look at the second and third paragraphs of the foodie article I linked above, for a total of 425 characters. It contains 84 unique kanji excluding terms which had furigana attached, which I have removed.

63 (75&#37 are kyoiku
14 (17%, rounding up) are joyo, non-kyoiku.
So 92% are joyo (one was new-list).
8% are outside the joyo list (栗 炒 醤 鴨 酥 餃 瓜).

That the non-joyo all about food/cooking is not surprising. This will be the same for any specialist subject.

All I'm saying is that really, it's more efficient to go through something like the kyouiku kanji and then focus on vocabulary (deeper knowledge, for fewer kanji), picking up more kanji where appropriate depending on what you're reading, then to go through all the joyo and then figure out which ones were useful afterwards.

I'm speaking as someone who worked through Kanken DS and similar, and then chose to stop doing them because the vocabulary that it was requiring me to learn was too far removed from the vocabulary I wanted to learn. I did most of the food-themed kanji quizzes on "なぞっておぼえる大人の漢字練習" instead, that was far more useful (to me) then grinding through the joyo list for no particular reason.

 

[Mike Cash]

Fluency in a foreign language in 2 years from scratch seems pretty ridiculous and arrogant.

Oh, fluency is totally doable. Proficiency is a different matter.....

(One can be fluent and still have speech that is riddled with errors to the point of being unintelligible).

 

[FinancialWar]

No, it is not. It is, I think, used to restrict the use of kanji in government documents/textbooks, but the joyo list is not legally binding for publishers and they only tend to use it as a guide. That is why things like the 新聞漢字表 exist - they are internal guidelines which differ from the joyo list, which newspaper publishers use. I'm not picking out those 18 kanji at random - those are the kanji that one particular (major) newspaper has picked as useful, and they're all Japanese. 炒める (stir-fry) and 栗 (chestnut) were both in my original list of useful non-joyo kanji I could think of, because you see them a lot in cooking/gourmet articles. 絆 has been pretty popular as a term recently, too. I recognise some of the others - not all, but they might be useful in specific contexts. They're not "chance of occurrence negligible", because they wouldn't bother to even come up with the list if they weren't using them regularly.

Here's wikipedia for you:

As the aim of the joyo list is to provide a standard for kanji use, not a restriction, it has no force in law.

珍しい中国・東北部の家庭料理とは : グルメが何でぃ : フード＆スイーツ : グルメ : YOMIURI ONLINE（読売新聞）
- here's yomiuri putting furigana in brackets for some words (placenames, chinese terms), but not for 片栗粉 炒め 水餃子 or 醤油. Are you telling me they just forgot? No, it's because those terms are recognizable to the sort of people who read the gourmet section of the newspaper, so they don't need furigana.



Joyo coverage for what? It depends hugely on what you're reading.
菅氏「小沢氏の個利個略だ、呪縛から離れよ」 : 政治 : YOMIURI ONLINE（読売新聞）
In the first sentence of this (first thing on the front page, blergh, politics), there are no no-joyo outside names in the first sentence.
There are also no non-kyouiku outside names in the first paragraph
In the second (still ignoring names) there are four non-kyouiku, but joyo kanji: 離 and 縛, 呪 and 駒 (last two are on the new list)
In the third (just one sentence) there is one 及 which is not in the kyouiku but is in the joyo.
In the last there is 摘 and 陣, also 狙 (new list)

106 unique kanji in 354 characters
菅前小沢郎田 (6) only used in names, so 100 kanji used in words.
92 of those are within the 1006 教育漢字 (kyoiku).
8 of those are joyo but not kyoiku (half of them from the new list).

So yes, the joyo would cover everything in this particular document, but you don't need to learn over a thousand extra characters to pick up just those 8, do you? You can't say anything from this about how many of those joyo characters you wouldn't need to bother with to be able to read this, or . And I would argue that if you can't figure out the meaning of 指摘 from the context and some knowledge of 指, you're doing something wrong, so it's not as if it's as simple as "percentage of kanji you know in this article = percentage understanding of this article".

Let's look at the second and third paragraphs of the foodie article I linked above, for a total of 425 characters. It contains 84 unique kanji excluding terms which had furigana attached, which I have removed.

63 (75%) are kyoiku
14 (17%, rounding up) are joyo, non-kyoiku.
So 92% are joyo (one was new-list).
8% are outside the joyo list (栗 炒 醤 鴨 酥 餃 瓜).

That the non-joyo all about food/cooking is not surprising. This will be the same for any specialist subject.

All I'm saying is that really, it's more efficient to go through something like the kyouiku kanji and then focus on vocabulary (deeper knowledge, for fewer kanji), picking up more kanji where appropriate depending on what you're reading, then to go through all the joyo and then figure out which ones were useful afterwards.

I'm speaking as someone who worked through Kanken DS and similar, and then chose to stop doing them because the vocabulary that it was requiring me to learn was too far removed from the vocabulary I wanted to learn. I did most of the food-themed kanji quizzes on "なぞっておぼえる大人の漢字練習" instead, that was far more useful (to me) then grinding through the joyo list for no particular reason.

"なぞっておぼえる大人の漢字練習" seems interesting, how is it different from Kanken DS. Where can I get it?

I don't know if there are any Kanji games updated with the new Joyo list, all the kanken games I have are based on the the previous 1945 joyo list.

You are right about kyouiku kanji being more useful, the first unit amount of things you learn will always be far more useful than the second unit amount.

 

[GreatMrPlinkett]

Learning Japanese, or any language is NOT that cut and dried. It's a long, very difficult process that comes from discipline, hard work, and immersion. If you want to REALLY learn a language, then you also have to learn the mindset. It's not just "Say X in Y language," it's also learning how a native would think and approach a given situation. That's how I feel. There's a million more things I could say, but I'm not gonna ramble.