From: huttar@hp750.itg.ti.com (Lars Huttar)
Subject: Re: ``Kanji Education'' paper available by anonymous-ftp
Date: Thu, 21 Jan 1993 18:56:53 GMT
Organization: IEF Development, Texas Instruments Inc., Plano Texas
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molenda@i8.msi.umn.edu (Jason Molenda) writes:

>My senior paper here at the University of Minnesota is available by
>anonymous ftp, msi.umn.edu:~ftp/pub/molenda/kanji.education/paper.ps.
>
>Also in that directory is the original LaTeX source and a DVI (DeVice
>Independent) file.
>
>Jason Molenda, University of Minnesota, Supercomputer Inst., Technical Support
>SGI Iris Admin        molenda@jason.msi.umn.edu       DoD #1867     '77 CB750F

I just ghostview'd your Kanji Education paper.  $B$4$/$m$5$^$G$9!*(B
Very informative and thought-provoking.  Thanks for sharing it
with us on the net.
        I have some responses, ideas for future directions on this
topic.  I realize you're probably sick of this stuff, so that's
why I'm posting on the net instead of mailing to you.

[For those who haven't read the paper, I recommend it.  The author
took samples of Japanese text from the fj.* groups, and did some
statistics on them.  He showed, among other things, that if a student
can learn to read the most common 1,000 kanji in that sample, that
student can read almost 95% of the occurences of kanji in the sample.]

        As you said, the kind of writing done on Usenet is an "unusual
mix of spoken and written Japanese."  As such, it may not well
represent the mainstream of written Japanese.  It may be
representative of the kind of writing in manga, but not in newspapers.
(I don't know -- I'm just raising the question.)  I think we need to
address what reading level, or style of document, the student is
aiming at being able to read.  Then we can ask, how much study does
one need to be able to read 95% of a newspaper?  a comic?  a novel?
This leads to another question: how efficient are the various written
media in terms of reinforcing common kanji, boosting confidence,
learning new kanji, learning spoken idioms, etc.?  These criteria are
somewhat at odds.
        To facilitate research on these questions, are there other
electronic sources of Japanese text, which are more representative of
the mainstream, or at least biased differently?

        Looking at the appendix where the kanji [3396 unique kanji
found in a Usenet sample] are listed, I notice that the first two are 
$BBg(B (`dai', big) and $B3X(B (`gaku', school).  Although these are common
characters in general, it seems likely that their frequency was
boosted in these samples by the many names of universities and
commercial research institutions in the writers' addresses.  So again
we have to ask how accurate these orderings are...  Please don't take
this as a complaint; I see it as a direction for future work.
        To get some indication of the precision of the samples, I
would like to compare the kanji-frequency orders gained from the two
samples taken 6 months apart.  Do any kanji vary widely as to their
place in the list?  (I suppose a statistician could come up with a
nice metric on this.)  What if a student learned the first 1000
characters in sample 1, and tried to read sample 2 -- what percentage
would be readable?
        Another thing to try would be comparing your two frequency
lists with ones already published.  The only one I know of off-hand is
the one of the Joyo kanji in the back of Halpern's Shin-kanei-jiten.
You probably know of others.  These lists are probably based on more
mainstream text, or at least more formal text.  So how do these lists
perform on your samples?  I.e. if a student learned the 1000 most
common kanji on one of these published lists, how much of your samples
would they be able to read?  Conversely, if a student learned the 1000
most common kanji on one of your lists, how many of the 1000 most
common on the published list would they be able to read?

        One more thing...  I appreciated your point of focussing on
learning to _recognize_ kanji early on, rather than learning to write
them.  I agree that a student can get a lot more learning mileage out
of being able to read characters than being able to write them, given
a constant amount of study time.  Initially, however, I think it's
important to learn to write some kanji well, and to write a lot of
kanji at least once, so that the student can learn kanji elements, and
thus be able to recognize them, and look them up, even when they don't
appear in the neatest book font.

Lars Huttar, huttar@hp750.itg.ti.com           3
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