Around 500 Kanji good at the start?

12 comments

1. if i were to say no, what would you do?

2. Which 500 kanji would you mean? Going from jlpt, most frequently used or school grade? Because this makes a difference

   If you go by most frequent then you would probably be able to have some rough understanding of a random newspaper article, but you wouldn’t be able to know the exact details, like proper names or more specialised verbs. Randomly guessing, something around 70-80% understanding? There was a video/website/post that had a kind of simulation of how well you would be able to understand 70%/80%/90% English as a non native speaker, let me see if I can find it again.

   Generally it’s a good start to not be completely overwhelmed, but other than simple texts you probably won’t be able to read too much (without having to look up kanji frequently I mean)

   Edit: it was a reddit post [what 80% comprehension feels like](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/uxr6zf/what_80_comprehension_feels_like/)

3. That’s not the correct mindset. You should not just learn 500 kanji and then stop “for a while”. The only good thing to do is to read a lot and continue learning new words with new kanji. Also, a fluent/native speaker knows way more that 2000 kanji. 2000 is just the number of the official kanji in basic education, nothing more and nothing less.

4. Spending time learning kanji up front pays big dividends later on:

   – the more kanji you know, the better you get at recognizing them, especially differentiating kanji that are only one radical different

   – knowing the meanings and common readings of a lot of kanji means that you can take a guess at the meaning and reading of unknown words with pretty good accuracy

   – you don’t have to puzzle over kanji when you’re reading textbooks or content that you’re using to learn, and can instead focus on learning whatever it is you’re supposed to be learning

   – you really learn to understand the language by reading, and you can’t read unless you have a thorough grounding in kanji

   – assuming you’re learning words that use the kanji you’re learning at the same time, you’ll build up a large vocabulary fast

   I spent a shit load of time learning kanji up front (finishing and then mastering Wanikani basically) and it’s one of those cases of going slow to go fast: it’s a grind and you don’t feel like you’re doing anything to actually learn the language itself, but once it’s done you can make much more rapid progress than you otherwise would.

5. A good rule of thumb is 1000 kanji should help you read around 80% of content online. The last 1000 kanji are N1 kanji that are used less. They are still important but at the beginning 1000 should be enough to start I’d say. The rest can be learned with time or through vocabs.

6. kanji as in individual characters or have you learned words as well?:0 500 characters can make up a lot of words you may see online , a great start imo , use a reading aid like the rikaikun extension on chrome and try reading native content slowly, learn more words as you proceed, try reading some easy mangas, its ok if you dont understand all of it.

   But I’m gonna be honest with you, i couldn’t understand a lot of stuff or do fast reading until i knew over 1500 kanji, which includes thousands of words, so the process might be slow, don’t be afraid of seeing new kanji often, you’ll get to the point eventually when there’s gonna be less new and more stuff you would already know.

7. Honestly it doesnt really matter you want to stop at 500, youre inevitably going over that amount cause youll keep encountering words you dont know regardless of what you read or watch.

   Im just over the 1100 kanji mark and still cant freely read stuff without having to look up a bunch of words every single time, a lot of them with totally new kanji too, which goes to show any number you set as an objective is still not gonna be enough.

   You shouldnt be worrying about numbers too much, just focus on your grammar and learn new words every chance you get. Also, id really advice against learning isolated kanji, learn full words instead.

8. One can read about 40 words maybe with the 500 most common Chinese characters.

   One will recognise many more Chinese characters in other words, even all of the characters in the word, but one won’t know how to pronounce them, nor what they mean.

   For instance “息子”, a very common word is composed of two characters “breath” and “child”. Could you have guessed the meaning was “son”, specifically a male child from those characters? Probably not. It’s fairly useless to learn Chinese characters without learning the words, and learning words will make one automatically recognise the Chinese characters by which they are written.

9. Kanji are not words (well, except for the single kanji words). Learn words.

10. I wouldn’t stop at 500. I’d say just read and increase that number but I’d say don’t worry about a goal for kanji. Since like myself, I can only list about 20-30 kanji from the top of my head but I know I know way more kanji than I can list off. Since kanji isn’t your main focus. It’s still worth learning. Plus, you might regret not learning kanji sooner

11. Depends on your goals. If you want to consume media, that’s not even baby level.

12. you can’t read kanji, full stop

    learn words, not characters

    this is like asking how much english you can read if you learn 15 letters