People learn languages for a variety of purposes. Some people just want to know enough to be able to ask where the bathroom is and read a menu at a resturant.
That's fair, though I think in the case of wanting to be able to be a tourist in a place with a foreign language, you'd be better suited using phrasebooks and a translation app. Duolingo isn't going to really prepare you to have those kinds of conversations and isn't really a reference book, so being able to look up the few phrases you need to get around isn't practical. It's designed to teach you the language in a structured way and while the ordering of it and most language courses does attempt to get people proficient at very basic touristy things, depending on what it is you're doing, you might not even get to the point where you can do that.
Reading a menu requires cultural context along with reading comprehension. Unless you're intimately familiar with the culture, being able to read it (as in sound it out by reading the characters) is pretty useless. نان (naan) is probably something you could understand because it's a loanword we use in English from Arabic but without cultural context could someone guess what قابلی پلاؤ (Kabuli Pilau) means? Probably not. If you're in Japan and China, learning to read a menu is in itself a huge barrier.
I’ve spent most of the last year struggling to learn the Arabic alphabet with Duolingo, yet FWIW my guess for what sort of dish Kabuli Pilau might be was fairly close.
I wonder if anyone outside the UK knows, or can guess, what sort of dish a “spotted dick” or a “toad in the hole” is?
I presumably made the same guess (spiced rice grains mixed with meat/veg), but British people have the cultural context to know what pilau means. They even a section in Tesco (not just a search, an actual section).
From Denmark, I can suggest brændende kærlighed (burning love, which for Danes is mashed potatoes and bacon), dyrlægens natmad (vet's night snack, rye bread with pâté, beef and meat jelly etc), æbleskiver (apple slices, round pancakes with zero apple).
> æbleskiver (apple slices, round pancakes with zero apple)
That reminds me that the regional name for deep fried rectangular potato prisms in Berlin is “Pommes”, which is the French for apple, because everything else was dropped from the bowed French “pommes de terre friets”.
1. I have had some incredible Kabuli pilau. I hope everyone gets the chance to have some. There are quite a few restaurants in the Bay Area that serve it, but homemade is best in my experience.
2. Spotted dick is a cake (steamed?) with currants… at least the stuff I had. Delicious.
3. No idea about toad in the hole. It better be good with that name.
In America, plenty learn for fun and status. You can travel thousands of miles in the US and still speak to someone in English making language learning extremely rare.
Except you won't be able to do that with Duolingo. I'll go as far as saying that Duolingo is (very) negative for learners: it sells them the idea they are learning a language and progressing when they are in fact not.
A good example of that is a comment I read here on HN from a user defending Duolingo since it allowed him to master hiragana (one script of Japanese) after two years and half. This is normally taking a week, for a slow learner, and the rest is practicing for fluency.
Source: myself; learned and learning multiple languages, at university and by myself. Working in edtech research.
First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About 3000-5000 depending on what you read is enough. Then count 400-500 kanji per year if learning at university and being motivated (lot of people stops).
For conversation count two intensive years for the bare minimum, add one for more fluency. Actually all depends on how much effort you spend on it, I know a guy who was JLPT N2 or so after it's first university year (needless to say, he spent an aweful amount of time practicing, especially with natives). Then add at least one year in Japan to really get a good grasp (I went from N3 to N2 in a year while basically partying).
> First, you don't need 10k kanji to read. About 3000-5000 depending on what you read is enough.
You’re still grossly over-representing what is needed to read Japanese.
1. 10k characters is utter nonsense. I assume that people conflate the 10k words needed for JLPT N1 with characters. They are totally different, since words are often combinations of characters.
2. Joyo kanji has 2,136 characters. All government documents and pretty much all mainstream media use only these characters plus some kanji specific to names. Any kanji outside of joyo (e.g., an unusual name or a stylistic word) typically have a phonetic reading (furigana) next to or over the character(s). Joyo is what is tested for the JLPT 1 (the top level).
3. Hundreds of joyo kanji are very context-specific — that is, they are relatively low utility.
4. There are a few additional kanji outside of joyo that are widely known. Educated folks also know more than joyo that are specialist terms or stylistic words. It would be like an English speaker knowing words like “deoxyribonucleic acid” (DNA) or “ceteris paribus”.
5. Lastly, for anyone reading Classical Japanese or historical documents… well, much of the above is not relevant due to changes in the language (mostly simplification over time). It depends on what is being studied or read.
6. 3000 kanji nets someone “highly educated native speaker” status — think teacher, doctor, lawyer. 5000 kanji gets you nerd status — think professor or logomaniac.
Well you admit yourself in your 5th and 6th points that I'm right. I chatted as soon as yesterday with someone studying Vietnamese dictionaries written in kanbun and nôm, so indeed that person need to know a lot of kanji. That's not representative of the whole society, but you can't rule out the existence of those people. It's also telling that the biggest dictionary of Chinese characters is the Daikanwa Jiten, compiled by a Japanese.
> Well you admit yourself in your 5th and 6th points that I'm right.
We might be talking past each other. I’m speaking specifically of non-native learners of Japanese.
I think you overrepresented for non-native learners of Japanese (who don’t get the benefit of 9 years of joyo kanji education), but you were closer to “right” than most.
Most learners of Japanese should focus on about 1000 kanji (roughly kyouiku kanji). This is easily learnable in a year for most people, and that amount will get them over 90% of text coverage that general learners will be reading.
Pretty much no learner should have an initial goal of learning 3000 kanji. Once they learn the 2000 joyo, pass N1, and probably do some tertiary education in Japan, then maybe they can choose to move that direction, especially if they plan on being a professional in Japan. Unless they find it to be a fun hobby, I would ask them why they are choosing to reach that level as a goal. The 2000th to 3000th most frequently used characters have very low utility, and this knowledge is far beyond “need this to survive/thrive” level. Some people who answer the “how many kanji” question in English-speaking forums (not you) seem to treat 3000 characters as almost semi-literate, and this couldn’t be further from the truth.
For a learner of Japanese, I would never recommend that anyone start with an initial goal of 5000 kanji. For anyone who ends up there, it would usually just come naturally over time to anyone being an academic (most likely in some sort of language or linguistics field)… and the masochists who try to take kanken 1.
Finally, to address your initial comment about 3000-5000 kanji being enough depending on what someone reads, I would put that number at more like 1200-1300 being enough with very mild use of a dictionary or lookup function on a computer/phone for learners. This will get folks though the vast majority of kanji in newspapers, magazines, and general audience books. At that point, just reading and looking stuff up will add to their kanji knowledge base organically.
> Once they learn the 2000 joyo, pass N1, and probably do some tertiary education in Japan, then maybe they can choose to move that direction
For the vast majority of people (including native speakers), knowing a few extra kanji outside of joyo brings very little benefit.
Most natives get by just fine by having a very rough understanding of even joyo [1], thanks to smartphones and computers.
Improving pitch accent, on the other hand, does change how you are perceived by natives [2], so it may be worth a try if your goal is to get closer to native speakers.
While it's been posted before, with just under 800 kanji you can have coverage of 90% of kanji in the wild. Of course, one still needs to learn all the clustered terms that these kanji can play together to create, but it reduces the barrier to native media substantially. [0]
This is pretty valid, but sometimes people with limited knowledge will do something seemingly innocuous like ask where the 'toilet' is rather than the more polite reference and totally freak a complete stranger out. I think it's not a bad idea to do your best to try and learn at least a little bit beyond this before dropping into a foreign country, at the least because it makes the whole meeting new friends thing a lot easier.
Cultural context is difficult but it also can’t be learned unless you already have some language skills. It’s not helpful to expect 2nd language speakers never to make mistakes Like the foreign exchange student asking for a rubber instead of an eraser, those mistakes can be great learning points.
