Comments on Henrik Falck's blog: Learning Kanji - It's Called Literacy, Dumbass!

Interestingly enough in the questionnaires a lot o...

2008-12-27T22:28:00.000+09:00

Interestingly enough in the questionnaires a lot of people can't read jouyou kanji in isolation but can read a lot in the context of words. There are about 20 jouyou kanji that most Japanese can't read.

Anonymous,I think being literate in Japanese means...

2008-12-23T00:47:00.000+09:00

Anonymous,
I think being literate in Japanese means being able to at least read common fiction and non-fiction books and newspapers, and for that you need to be able to read words written using "all" (all minus a handful of useless ones) joujou kanji (plus some more). I guess you could argue what constitutes "knowing" a kanji, and that literacy is quantifiable and not absolute, but basically yes, I think that not being able to read all the jouyou kanji constitutes illiteracy in Japanese. I don't think you need to know the stroke orders. I'd love to read your dissertation... :)

I am writing my dissertation on Japanese litearcy....

2008-12-23T00:05:00.000+09:00

I am writing my dissertation on Japanese litearcy. Do you relly think not knowing all the jouyou kanji constitutes illiteracy? I don't.

I can't agree more, these folks are not worth deba...

2008-09-04T11:43:00.000+09:00

I can't agree more, these folks are not worth debating. If you actually are learning so slowly or unintensively that knowing which "20 to 50" kanji on the list are "not necessary" is invaluable information to you, you're never going to get anywhere near literate IN YOUR LIFETIME anyway so just forget it and find a new hobby. I say: don't like having this little list as an invaluable kick start of stuff to learn ASAP, ? Okay fine. Shut up about it and go pick a random assortment of 2,000 out of a 60,000 kanji dictionary and tell me how spotty your coverage of a newspaper is when you are done.