percentage of kanji in sentences

[Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven]

Via some website
(https://www.calico.org/a-398-On%20Developing%20HyperCard%20Stacks%20for%20the%20Study%20of%20Chinese%20Characters%20KanjiCard.html)
I encountered the following:

In present-day Japanese, the average rate of Kanji use in sentences is
approximately 30% (Kaiho, 1980 p. 47).

Kaiho, H. (1980) "Kanji No Ganyuuritsu (The Rate of Kanji Use in Sentences),
Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Japanese Association of
Psychology, 367.

That got me thinking that over the past 30 years more words got written in
hiragana that were previously written in kanji, plus more loanwords in
katakana entered the scene, so the rate might be even less than 30%
nowadays.

I am curious what other people have noticed. I am fully aware that some
disciplines are more kanji-heavy than others, of course, but I am curious to
see if some trend has been going on since 1980 one way or another.

--
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai
イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン
http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/ | GPG: 2EAC625B
The riddle master himself lost the key to his own riddles one day, and
found it again at the bottom of his heart.

[Minoru Mochizuki]

I have no statistical data to speak of so that I have nothing to add here as
to the discussion of the percentages of different ingredients of today's
written Japanese.

Kanji, or Hanzi, have been a heavy burden to both Japanese and Chinese, and
it had to be taught intensively at school in both countries. In other Asian
countries, like in Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam, it was given up altogether
for various reasons. The trace of Kanji remains only as phonetic expressions
in those countries. (課長, a Kanji word, a job title invented in modern
Japan meaning a section manager,　remains in Korean as Kajan phonetically
today, if I am not wrong.)

Kanji, as well as the thought, philosophy and idea each of which
represented, was an imported piece of culture for Japanese in those days,
just like many English, German and French words expressed in Katakana are
today. There is no essential difference in that sense between Kanji and
Katakanized European words. Japanese is a thick soup of words.

Minoru Mochizuki

-----Original Message-----
From: hon...@googlegroups.com [mailto:hon...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf
Of Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven
Sent: Saturday, March 27, 2010 8:12 AM
To: hon...@googlegroups.com
Subject: percentage of kanji in sentences

Via some website
(https://www.calico.org/a-398-On%20Developing%20HyperCard%20Stacks%20for%20t

[Ginstrom IT Solutions]

> Behalf Of Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven

> I am curious what other people have noticed. I am fully aware that some
> disciplines are more kanji-heavy than others, of course, but I am curious
> to
> see if some trend has been going on since 1980 one way or another.

The proportion of kanji in newspapers is certainly higher. I took the top three news articles on Yahoo Japan news and asahi.com; both had 47% kanji.

I'd be interested in seeing bilingual corpora in various fields, because I'd like to use the data to write a program to estimate the number of English words from a Japanese original based on field/character mix. My intuition is that kanji density will have a large impact on the English word count of the translation.

Regards,
Ryan

--
Ryan Ginstrom
trans...@ginstrom.com
http://ginstrom.com/

[David Young]

In other Asian countries, like in Korea, Indonesia and Vietnam, it was given up altogether for various reasons.>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Indonesia? Tell me more.
David Young

[Minoru Mochizuki]

The number of people who use the official language of Indonesia, Bahasa Indonesia, as their daily tool of communication is approximately only 30 million while the total population is 238 million, although Bahasa Indonesia is understood by most people because it was chosen as the national language and taught at school. According to one report, there are more than 580 different languages used in Indonesia as daily tools of conversation.

In the meanwhile, there are three other languages, namely, Chinese, Tamil and English that are taught as official languages in Indonesia. I don't know how Chinese are used and taught in Indonesia, so it was my mistake to mention Indonesia in parallel with Korean. I was too casual. Perhaps Chinese descent Indonesians are being taught in school using Hanzi. I remember I met many nicely attired school children of Chinese origin on the beach of Kota Denpasar. They looked distinct from other groups.

My apology.

[Yoshiro Shibasaki]

As Japanese language uses many homonyms, it is very difficult to read
sentences without Kanji. You realise it when you read a Japanese
sentence written in Kana only or Roma-ji. We also lose flexibility of
writing humour based on puns and homonyms.

Yoshi

--
芝崎芳朗 Yoshiro Shibasaki, PhD Tel.&Fax: [+44]131-229-0878
Edinburgh, Scotland (UK) Mobile: 07808 925 795
Scientific Translator/Interpreter/Consultant
English/German/Danish/Japanese (biomedical sciences)

[Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven]

-On [20100328 12:35], Yoshiro Shibasaki (yo...@easynet.co.uk) wrote:
>As Japanese language uses many homonyms, it is very difficult to read
>sentences without Kanji. You realise it when you read a Japanese
>sentence written in Kana only or Roma-ji. We also lose flexibility of
>writing humour based on puns and homonyms.

Is this a personal or scientific observation? I ask since the details of
experiments done in Japan after the Second World War was ended showed that
not using kanji didn't impact comprehension skills as much as you state
above (or at all for that matter). (See J. Marshall Unger's "Literacy and
Script Reform in Occupation Japan" for background.)

Similarly, since original Vietnamese had a large numbers of Chinese words as
well, and as such a lot of homophones, the same problem would occur. But it
never was much of a problem since typically the stand alone words are in
general the most widespread and the rest is either obscure (debatable) or
used in compounds, which clarify the use.

So I seriously wonder if this will be as much a problem as people keep
wanting to claim it would be. But that's digressing to the rehashed topic of
kanji use being a nationalistic symbol or a linguistic necessity (see
archives).

--
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven <asmodai(-at-)in-nomine.org> / asmodai
イェルーン ラウフロック ヴァン デル ウェルヴェン
http://www.in-nomine.org/ | http://www.rangaku.org/ | GPG: 2EAC625B

Love conquers all...

[Yoshiro Shibasaki]

I thought the figure which Ryan suggested should be right. The news
paper statistics should represent the proportion of Kanji in "normal"
sentences. I guess the figure from the web site includes teenagers
email, etc. which is not representative of the written language.

Having said that, the old usage of some conjunctions and other small
words such as 従って、及び、又は、尚、且つ、但し、並びに is discouraged
by the Japanese Government. And some expressions like 宜しく、致します、
下さい are written in Hiragana in modern Japanese. Writing in Hiragana
gives some feel of softness for private use, while very official
documents tend to use more Kanji.

Yoshi

[Wataru Tenga]

Jeroen,

Do you know of many Japanese who are calling for an end to kanji use? If
not, there is really no reason for outsiders to keep bringing up this
topic. (I'm not being critical of you personally, since I know your
interest is merely academic.) Other languages that stopped using kanji
did so on their own. Until the Japanese come to feel kanji are a
needless nuisance, they will remain a part of the Japanese language and
culture. I suspect that means pretty much forever.

Wataru Tenga
Kichijoji, Tokyo

[Yoshiro Shibasaki]

From my own experience, the speed of reading Kanji-kana mixed text is
much faster than kana-only text. Probably for native Japanese speakers,
we do not really need to read but look at the Kanji-kana sentence to
grasp the meaning of it but kana-only sentence we also need to read out
and think what it means. For non-native speakers, there may be no
differences.

It might be interesting to point out that if we remove all the silent
letters of English words it will slow down your reading. For example,
"The flite for Edinbura is delayed to eite o'clock. (The flight for
Edinburgh is delayed to eight o'clock.)" And the abbreviated SMS text
messages often used by younger generations are not easy to read. "R u
free 2 meet tonite? (Are you free to meet tonight?)" These missing
letters are there to serve the purpose. The existence of Kanji is for
easy grasp of the meaning without thinking.

Yoshi

On 28/03/2010 11:54, Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven wrote:
> -On [20100328 12:35], Yoshiro Shibasaki (yo...@easynet.co.uk) wrote:
>
>> As Japanese language uses many homonyms, it is very difficult to read
>> sentences without Kanji. You realise it when you read a Japanese
>> sentence written in Kana only or Roma-ji. We also lose flexibility of
>> writing humour based on puns and homonyms.
>>
> Is this a personal or scientific observation? I ask since the details of
> experiments done in Japan after the Second World War was ended showed that
> not using kanji didn't impact comprehension skills as much as you state
> above (or at all for that matter). (See J. Marshall Unger's "Literacy and
> Script Reform in Occupation Japan" for background.)
>
> Similarly, since original Vietnamese had a large numbers of Chinese words as
> well, and as such a lot of homophones, the same problem would occur. But it
> never was much of a problem since typically the stand alone words are in
> general the most widespread and the rest is either obscure (debatable) or
> used in compounds, which clarify the use.
>
> So I seriously wonder if this will be as much a problem as people keep
> wanting to claim it would be. But that's digressing to the rehashed topic of
> kanji use being a nationalistic symbol or a linguistic necessity (see
> archives).
>
>

--

[TimL...@aol.com]

As a non-speaker of Japanese, I at first thought it would be easier if the texts I translate were all in romaji, then I started to think it would be OK if they were all in kana, preferably with foreign words in katakana. Not long after that, I realised how often I was recognising kanji instantly, like people's faces, and how helpful this was where the "equivalent" kana could only have  been disambiguated by understanding the whole sentence or even a longer passage.

 

The other, unexpected, aspect is that I find many kanji attractive to look at, and often interesting in terms of their components (man + tree = holiday; metal + eat = silver, etc.), so that I would be sorry to see them go, or even mutilated by oversimplification as in China.

 

FWIW

Tim

[William Sakovich]

[[I would be sorry to see them go, or even mutilated by oversimplification as in China.]]

 

Some Japanese hold they’ve already been mutilated by oversimplification in the postwar revision (g).

 

- Bill Sakovich

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[Mark Spahn]

Reading as an idiot-savant skill

What mode of script is best for reading?
A phonetic script? An abbreviated phonetic script,
such as Gregg shorthand or vowellessly written Arabic?
A pictorial script such as Chinese? A mixed phonetic-
and-pictorial script such as Japanese?

Plausible arguments and personal-experience
testimonials are given in favor of each answer,
but it is noteworthy that the discussion of this
topic is so data-free. Hasn't anyone conducted
an experiment that would resolve the question?

Well, no. For consider what such an experiment
woud involve. We want to compare the facility
with which people read who grew up reading
script 1 (.e.g, romaji), versus those who grew
up reading script 2 (e.g., kanji-kana majiri-bun).
For a valid result, you would need two largish
groups of children, one raised in script 1 and
the other in script 2, and you would have to
ensure no cross-contamination that would occur
if one were to allow the script-1 kids to read
script-2 comic books. Such a study would be
very expensive and time-consuming, and if it
turned out that one of the scripts crippled its
learners' reading skills, it would be an actionable
form of child abuse.

One skill famous among idiot savants is the ability
to instantly determine the day of the week of
any given date, such as "January 18, 1733 was
a Tuesday", or "November 29, 2246 will be a
Saturday". There once was a graduate student
who single-mindedly devoted months and months
to learning this algorithm, one which must involve
determining the remainder (day of the week)
when a four-digit number is divided by 7.
He lived and breathed this parlor trick, and at
the end he came to do it automatically, skipping
any consciousness of the intermediate steps.

Reading seems to be a similar idiot-savant skill.
Virtually anyone can acquire it, but it takes
years and years (10,000 hours, says Malcolm Gladwell)
to do it with enough facility to absorb what
you are reading without any conscious effort
to decode the patterns on the page or computer screen.

It is speculated that the reason an idiot savant
can acquire such a skill is that idiot savants have
a very high tolerance for the boring, repetitive
practice needed for learning something that is
not fun to learn. To get normal children to
acquire such a skill, they would have to be locked
up in a special institution for hours a day, for years.

-- Mrk Sphn (Wst Snca, NY)

[lili...@mail.goo.ne.jp]

> but it is noteworthy that the discussion of this
> topic is so data-free.

I've read a few studies done on the topic on kanji-kana usage
in Gekkan Gengo （月刊言語）, but the problem is that I
cannot remember which issues they were in...

I've seen following studies done in the past and at least
some of them were in 月刊言語:
1) percentage of kanji in a text (generic), post-war up to 2000s
2) percentage of kanji in business documents,
pre-wordprocessor and post-wordprocessor
2) distribution and choice of kanji in literary texts,
sorted and analyzed by author (pre-J-Bungaku)
3) percentage and choice of kanji in a text (generic),
sorted and analyzed by age and by sex
4) recognition speed of kanji-kana versus all-kana versus romaji
5) recognition spped of Japanese (kanji-kana)
versus English (alphabet)
6) analysis on the use of ate-ji in lyrics, post-war up to... can't remember

I think #4 and $5 I read in a book by 鈴木孝夫 and
#6 I think I read in Bessatsu Takarajima（別冊宝島）.

Maybe someone on the list can dig up the old issues of 月刊言語?
Mine are in the storage:(

Ai Matsuzono

[Minoru Mochizuki]

I would agree with Wataru Tenga's opinion here, not because I think that it
is more convenient or efficient to have Kanji as a part of Japanese
sentences for the purpose of reading and capturing meaning efficiently (hell
no to writing purpose), but because I believe we Japanese simply want to
keep Kanji as Wataru suspected as a part of our culture.

It is rather a futile effort to measure scientifically whether a phonetic
sentence is more efficient or not. If we are measuring the cultural strength
of a nation based on the use of the language people use, there is no
question Japan is ranking in the top group judging from its cultural and
industrial fruits it produces for the size of its population. It is obvious
that its language is at least not a source of distraction. One can argue
that Japanese is more difficult to learn than English, but so what?

On the other hand, Japan invented its own phonetic characters in 9th century
A.D. or there about, while Kanji was used as a tool of male aristocrats and
warriors, in general, the ruling class. The situation in China as to the use
of Kanji or Hanzi remained the same, meaning that it was not a tool of
communication for average citizens as the literacy rate remained low. Thus,
while novels and folk tales for average persons flourished in Japan all
through Edo Period, there was no such wave in China because they never
invented phonetic characters. So, Chinese can boast of the invention of
Kanji in 15th century B.C., we cannot find any evidence of its use as a tool
writing novels and such because there simply did not exist any substantial
amount of consumers.

We cherish the mix of Kanji and Kana.

Minoru Mochizuki

-----Original Message-----
From: hon...@googlegroups.com [mailto:hon...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf

Jeroen,

Wataru Tenga
Kichijoji, Tokyo

--

[Yoshiro Shibasaki]

As Tim said, Kanji helps to grasp meaning of the sentences by its
pattern. Even with phonetic script, people are "reading" by patterns.

Here is an English text to prove it (Just read it through and don't stop
and think):

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it
deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the
olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at
the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can
sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn
mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as
a wlohe.

Yoshi

[Wagner Joseph]

Wow, thats really cool. Thanks Yoshi.

Yoshi

[Keith Roeller]

Jeroen,

As I recall, there was a lot of hand-wringing in Japan during the era
of your study about the decline in kanji use as people began living
busier lives, and the perceived loss of culture. Newspaper editorials
fretted about the burden imposed on Japanese children by having to
learn a lot of kanji, how this was taking away school time from more
important subjects, and putting Japan at a disadvantage.

The issue basically went away with the spread of word processors and
computers that made using kanji a lot easier, and sparked the "kanji
revival." I've never studied the issue, but would certainly not
discount the impact that technology has had on kanji use rates over
the last few decades.

Keith Roeller

[demayer]

 

 

> > [[I would be sorry to see them go, or even mutilated by oversimplification as in China.]]

 

> Some Japanese hold they’ve already been mutilated by oversimplification in the postwar revision (g).

 

And now some cultural/political luminaries in the PRC are calling for a return to traditional characters:

www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/updates.php?searchterm=0903characters.inc

 

David Mayer, Taipei