The Sufficiency of 1500 Kanji for Reading Japanese

📚 To read Japanese, it is commonly believed that one needs to know around 2,000-2,500 kanji, as listed in the Joyocongilus.

📝 However, even the minimum benchmark of 1,500 kanji is insufficient to fully comprehend Japanese texts and official documents.

💻📰📖 In this video, the speaker tests their ability to read Japanese in real-life situations, such as internet browsing, news articles, manga, and books.

📚 Knowing a minimum of 1500 kanji is essential for reading Japanese texts.

🔍 Being able to look up kanji in a dictionary even if you don't know the word is important.

🌐 Browsing popular Japanese websites revealed new kanji and their frequency.

📚 Reading 1500 kanji allows for understanding and navigating various websites such as shopping platforms, Wikipedia, and Amazon.

🗒️ The percentage of new kanji encountered on Wikipedia and Amazon was lower than expected, indicating the ability to comprehend beginner-level articles.

🌐 The speaker's confidence in reading Japanese improved as they realized they could comprehend and navigate through online content.

📚 Approximately 4.9% of the kanji encountered were new, requiring frequent look-ups while reading.

📰 Reading news articles in Japanese can be challenging due to the difficulty of the language, even for native speakers.

💻 For internet browsing, including data from various sources, the overall percentage of new kanji encountered was 1.4%.

The video explores whether knowing 1500 Kanji is enough to read Japanese.

The results show that reading news articles in Japanese requires knowing about 1 in 22 Kanji.

Reading manga and Japanese books also require a certain level of Kanji knowledge.

📚 After studying 1,500 kanji, the speaker found that only 1 in 50 kanji encountered in Japanese literature were new to them.

📖 The speaker's final result showed that they only had to look up around 1 in 40 kanji on average when reading most texts in daily life.

🔢 The overall percentage of new kanji encountered in their study was 2.4%.

There isn't a specific number of kanji you need to learn to read Japanese well.

Learning more kanji reduces the need to look up new ones, with 1500 kanji covering around 97% of encountered kanji.

Studying Japanese kanji is crucial for reading ability, especially when visiting Japan.