How many symbols are needed for daily life in Japan?

6 comments

1. I believe this is just kanji. But you can combine them to do 35k or so words

2. …Do you actually know what the difference between kana and kanji is?

   the 2000 is in reference to kanji. It would be really weird to group in kana alongside it.

3. 2000 is what you need for the beginning. You’ll learn more based on your lifestyle.

4. if you mean jōyō kanji then there is 2136 of them

5. All of the 常用 kanji which is slightly more than 2000. Yes you absolutely need hiragana and katakana also.

6. If we speak about kanji, then average native usually knows 3-3.5k, while highly educated 5k+. A solid chunk of it are names and we come closer to the main topic, kanji isn’t exactly words. Basically if you learn for long enough, you will know somewhere around 20-40k words. Each word has it’s own pronunciation, but also the way it’s written. For example, in English word “know” is written as “know” and not “nou”, similarly in Japanese words are written with specific kanji. Usually the choice of kanji has some reason behind it and people can guess the meaning, but it’s always somewhere around being a guess and you will need to learn it anyway.

   Basically you need to learn words in 2 different forms, how it’s pronounced and how it’s written and how many you need would depend if you need to pronounce/listen to such word and if you need to read/write it. Usually we consider literate level and you will need 20k+ pronunciations and 20k+ written versions, but more specific situations can require some other numbers in both directions starting from 6k for basic topics and ending with 40k+.

   So it’s hard to say. We can say for sure that it’s kinda exponential, the more you learn, the easier it becomes, because it’s more familiar. It takes efforts to learn how kanji looks and much less efforts to learn how word is written. If you know that 食 is related to eating and 物 is related to object/things, then たべる “to eat” being written as 食べる isn’t so hard to memorize, and similarly 食べ物 as “food” neither, it’s things to eat. But essentially you still need to learn it all, how kanji looks, how word is pronounced, how it’s written and so on.