I am advancing in my study of Japanese and am slowly accepting that although the 常用漢字 are indeed the most common kanji without furigana, they are certainly not the only game in town.
I stumbled on the phrase 賽は投げられた (the die is cast) and for some reason, that first kanji hit me like a ton of bricks. Like, there it is, Japanese is a life long pursuit. After years of Japanese, I don’t recognize the word “dice” and needed to share my sorrow with my fellow Redditors.
The end game has infinite content and it’s both exhilarating and terrifying. Forwards and upwards I guess.
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For me it was the ability to actually ‘do stuff’ in Japanese after I learned most joyo kanji.
Reading manga, first novel, the news, playing video games (and actually understanding a fair bit of it).
For me it’s coming across a completely normal sentence (like a YouTube comment, not a science article) and suddenly there are these kanji I have no idea what they could be. And when I ask my dictionary turns out it’s a phrase/word I have known for the past 5 years but someone just had to be fancy by writing it with kanji instead of kana (the common way). Gets me every time.
Like 五月蝿い, I remember the first time I saw that I was like “oh god what is that”, nope it’s just うるさい.
賽 is a >[Kanji Kentei level 1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_Kentei#Level_1_%5B10%5D)< kanji
yes, there is still much to learn after 常用漢字
>there it is, Japanese is a life long pursuit.
I feel exactly the same way when I come across an idiom I don’t know reading English. After decades of learning still it happens like everyday 🙁
In practice, if you’re not reading very old texts (or history books involving old names), you reach a point around ~3000 kanji where you rarely encounter kanji you don’t know. *Saikoro* is almost always written in kana, because most Japanese people don’t know it, either. On the other hand, it’s a very common character in Chinese, where it’s read *sài* and means contest.