I had a good birthday! It was wonderful to celebrate with my parents this year in person rather than over Zoom. And this way, they got to share in the cake :) I actually went to the dentist that morning, so I felt a little bad that the first thing I ate after a cleaning was full of sugar... but not bad enough to not enjoy it.
My teeth gave me the gift of not having cavities. Someone I know is having two teeth pulled due to issues, and I don't have the best luck with my teeth in the first place, so it was a big worry! My parents gave me tea and books. Most of them were from a digital bundle of Japan-related books that they had already asked if I wanted, plus one in print,
Tokyo Ueno Station, the name of which I think I have heard before but which I don't know anything about. My gift to myself to celebrate graduating was a new phone that isn't physically degrading. (That's not entirely me being whiny - my old model had a well-known physical issue with one of its chips. I had to send it in for repairs at one point because it stopped booting due to that, but it never acted quite right afterward, to the point where it struggled to open messages, made me difficult to hear on calls, regularly skipped notifications, and forget about doing anything in reasonable time while playing a podcast.)
I spent the trip home playing Harvest Moon on Z's 3DS (he let me permanently borrow it a while back) and reading one of the books from the bundle that my dad was interested in and had started reading for himself,
Crazy For Kanji. And so far, I'm enjoying it - the author clearly loves kanji and playing with them, and I think the books has a good approach to trying to make the reader feel that way, too. It did, however, hit upon one of my pet peeves when it comes to kanji-learning materials: listing out how many kanji get you x% coverage of standard kanji usage, like 40% of kanji used are the most common 100, etc, and then bandying these numbers about to try to show how much you could understand without all the kanji. Maybe by knowing 100 kanji, you can just guess at the other 60%! Or play only games meant for small children that have only a few hundred kanji!
I say this as someone who forced myself through the first volume of Sailor Moon when I knew less than 200 kanji and maybe less than 100 (at that point it was great kana practice, though) - these statements are misleading and deceptive. They make it sound like you don't
really need to learn all 2k+ of those scary, scary kanji - look how much you can understand without them! But the
most frequent words are also those which are
least contentful and often
least important.
Here's an example of what trying to read normal, adult-level text with that approach looks like - I took a couple of the first paragraphs from
an article I just read and removed everything except the 500 most frequent words of English, words like numbers and 'its' that any new learner is likely going to learn right away, and proper nouns:
"Google Talk, Google's first-ever [] [] [], [] on August 24, 2005. This [] has been in the [] business for 16 years, [] Google has been making [] [] for [] than some of its [] have []. But thanks to a [] and a half of [] [] [] [], [] [] [], and [] [], you can't say Google has a [] or even [] [] [] [] today.
[], you would probably [] Google's [] [] every other big [] []. A [] of any kind of [] [] [] at Google has [] to a [] and a half of [] [], with Google both [] to leave the [] [] and [] to [] to a [] []. While [] like Facebook and Salesforce [] tens of billions of dollars into a [] [] [], Google [] [] only to [] up an [] [] of under-[], [] [] [] [] by job-[] [] []. There have been [] when Google [] [] a good [] [], but the [] [], []-[], and [] of [] [] have [] Google from [] much of these [] [] —or [] []—[] into the [] day."
Can you guess what a few of those blanks are? Probably. Can you guess the whole rest of the text is? No. Now imagine it's in a different context where you don't even know what kinds of companies 'Google' and 'Facebook' are, taking away the hint that it's about a giant tech company and its complete failure to develop a messaging app. Does this ratio of words-you-know to words-you-don't sound like a good time? Probably not. Maybe if you're very highly motivated and equipped with a dictionary, you can muddle through, but most people are going to give up and look for something closer to their skill level.
And let's be real, plenty of people are going to pick up Japanese to play video games and read manga or whatever, but how many of them only ever want to interact with children's media and not even, like, light novels? Heck, I've run into obscure kanji in middle-grade manga that aren't in the daily-use list, because the author likes kanji and they're going to be sticking furigana on everything anyway, might as well throw in 躙.
Of course you should study more common stuff before the more obscure things, and if you stick to the same topics, the vocabulary will be more limited - but eventually, you do need to suck it up and learn more words. You need to know something like ~15k headwords to read at an eighth grade level in English - it just feel dishonest to try and soothe the poor scared baby learners with 'you don't neeeeeed to learn thaaaat many'. Lack of vocabulary is the main barrier to me enjoying more Japanese media at this point! I do need to learn that many!
My kanji reference book,
Kanji in Context takes what feels like a much more reasonable approach: they recommend studying the first three or four levels, depending on your goals, of their six-level system, which covers the most common 1200 or 1420 kanji (this is pre-Jouyou expansion). This is supposed to teach you a broad general knowledge base of kanji and vocab, and then if you don't want to sit down and memorize the rest, you can learn through reading whatever is interesting or relevant to you and seeing what you encounter. (Though even then, I've run into their level 6 kanji in NHK Easy news articles about 滝 waterfalls, and 姫 princess shows up so much in fantasy manga that I knew what 'hime' meant before I started learning Japanese. Not to even mention ones like 呆, 嬉, and 嘘 that are relatively common, but not in jouyou for whatever reason.)
So, that one pet peeve that isn't unique to this author aside: I like how it takes a different and much more in-depth approach to kanji that any of my general textbooks ever have, and one of the sections covers something I only really learned much about recently. I wish any of my classes had talked more about kanji like this - it was pretty much just 'memorize them' and
maybe some discussion of stroke order and radicals if you were in one of the classes with the calligraphy teacher. You had to figure out the 'how' on your own - I did okay with Mnemosyne, but a lot of my classmates complained about it constantly - and there was never any discussion of ateji or phonetic components or any of confusing exceptions to the on-kun rules. (Am I ever going to cognizantly memorize the phonetic lines instead of just kind of learning that some kanji that look the same are pronounced the same? Ehhhh. I am inspired to actually sit down and memorize the radicals and their meanings properly instead of half-assedly knowing them based on mnemonics I made up years ago, though.)
My favorite bit so far is the section on ateji. I haven't gotten to the kanji country names part yet, but I smiled when I saw that. I remember learning about them way back when I got into Hetalia! Suddenly I understood why 米国 meant 'America'! I had to learn them + a bunch of special pairing names to search for fanart, because the Japanese fans were trying to fly as far under the radar as possible.
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