sentinels

[piranha]

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i now "know" all the first grade kanji (the ones school children in japan learn), plus the common (mostly smutty) ones from BL manga. "know" is in quotes because this is limited knowledge -- i recognize the kanji, i know what their primary reading [1], as introduced to the kids means. but i don't know all the readings for each of them, and i don't necessarily know what those kanji mean in compounds.

that's roughly 120 out of 1006 which kids learn over 6 years in elementary school, and which would allow one to read about 90% of japanese newspaper coverage. i'm hoping to actually learn all 1945 kanji determined to make one literate by the japanese ministry of education. knowing 3000 kanji would make one an excellent reader. luckily i don't need that many to translate manga, but it would be neat to be able to read literature too. but we'll see how long the depression lets me study; it's better now than it was, but still not particularly good; i have such a hard time concentrating, and my short-term memory needs a lot more repetition than it used to.

[1] japanese kanji can have readings of two main types: onyomi and kunyomi. onyomi means the characters are pronounced the way they were when they were introduced to japan from china (sort of; a modern form of it since japanese has developed independently since then). there were several waves of those, with some characters making multiple appearances. kunyomi are based on the pronunciation of a native japanese word closely approximating the meaning of the chinese character when it was introduced. generally, kunyomi are used for stand-alone kanji, and onyomi for compounds (but not always; there are oh so many exceptions, and compounds can also be hybrids). and each kanji can have several of either reading. so, yeah -- gazillions of readings for zillions of kanji (~50,000 kanji exist, though fortunately most of them are obscure). not even natives can figure rare ones out just from seeing them written (especially in names -- which is why, if you watch anime or read manga, you often see people who introduce themselves explain which kanji are used to write their names). fun times.

apparently there are game shows about rare kanji. it'll be a while before i can watch one of those.

Comments

[torachan]

The thing with name kanji is not just rareness, but that there are no rules to pronunciation when it comes to names. You can guess at a common reading, but even then, there are often two or three or five equally common readings. And of course there can be rarer readings or totally oddball readings that no one else has. Given names are worse than family names, since there are fewer family names and they tend to be more standard, but even then, there are a lot that are ambiguous. There is no way to know for sure!

Once I had a job transcribing and translating movies from video tapes and they wanted me to do the credits, too. For actors and directors and stuff, I could often find the readings online, but for everyone else, there was so much guessing, especially since many of the movies were filmed in a region notorious for its oddball name readings and a lot of the staff had very non-standard names. >_<

Anyway, good luck! One of the good things about kanji is that when you're familiar with them, you can easily guess at the meaning of words even if it's a compound you're not familiar with and you don't know the pronunciation.

[red_trillium]

Best wishes with learning the Kanji, I think you'd be able to learn it well enough to do translation. It might take a little while longer because of your depression getting in the way but I have faith in you.