This is the kind of sentiment I had when people ask me about 日本語 regarding: "do Japanese people memorize all 50000+ Kanji?" I'm like "NO" since they don't know all characters as only a small percentage of that is taught & used, around 2136. Although, some people learn jargon catered to specific fields (science, medicine) leading to them knowing 3000+ Kanji.

The estimated count for the "number of words" in English is 1,000,000 but that's not an exact answer. The thing is, how many words is a native English speaker expected to know & understand? How much vocab do they teach students at school (from spelling to grammar)? After learning the alphabet, what types of words are taught across schools in the Anglosphere to kids?

For perspective, kids in Japan only learn 80 Kanji in their first year (mainly common & easy ones: 犬、校、九、女、男、名、森、右 to list a few) but the number expands through their years. I mean, something "similar" exists in English with spelling being taught at schools (teachers give a list of words to memorize spelling followed by a spelling test later).

The vocab lists expand from elementary to high school with difficult words (there's a difference in difficulty with trying to spell a word like "animal" to "conscientious"). It's like how a Japanese kid knows how to handwrite 海外 but has a hard time on trying to understand 傭兵 (ようへい) since 傭 is a harder Kanji to write in comparison to 海.

Average native English speakers know about 20.000 to 35.000 words

For perspective, kids in Japan only learn 80 Kanji in their first year

Well...

All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force—to put in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party; often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common councils and modified by mutual interests. However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

—from George Washington's Farewell Address, warning about political parties

It is bad when groups try to stop our laws. It is bad when they try to tell our leaders what to do. This harms our country's main idea. These groups make one part of the people too strong. They want their own ideas, not what all the people want. Sometimes, a small group of clever people can do this. Then, the country's rules change all the time. This happens when different groups win. The government then acts on their changing plans. It does not act on good plans made by everyone. These groups might seem good at first. But later, bad people can use them. These bad people want to take power from the people. They want to rule the country themselves. Then, they will get rid of the groups that helped them.

—the above text, run through this to target a first grade reading level.

That's a pretty marked difference in vocabulary.

Do English speakers have to learn three different writing systems, one of which is entirely disconnected from word pronunciation?

No but the language is basically german latin and greek in a trenchcoat

It's a Germanic language with slightly more loanwords than other Germanic languages. It's not like Japanese doesn't have outside influence, kanji are a Chinese import and they have lots of western loanwords.

german latin and greek

hm... I'd say German, Latin, and Norse, for standard English? idk tho, I only speak American.

Yep, about that. 5000 is considered the minimum. A test I took places me at 57000 words, but I have read more English books than most people have seen, so that's that...

That first grade version comes off as pretty close to a certain orange leader.

The short answer is, of course, 'no'. For Japanese, I couldn't even hand-write all the 常用漢字 without looking at some reference, but I also know Japanese words my native-speaker wife does not just because of medical, legal, and job-based jargon. She, who has a sports education, knows a bunch of other health, education, etc. jargon that I don't.

Multiple countries have English as a first, co-official, or defacto language. I think it is difficult to paint an accurate picture that covers all of these, let alone if we include countries that have at as an official but minority language (and edge cases like international schools such as exist here in Japan).

You might be able to find per-country education guidelines online (though realize the US also does many things at the state level, so it may differ for every state at least there) which could give you an idea. You could also look at university entrance exams or similar tests to see what is being checked for at that level.

Norse is just German with extra steps.

The problem with George's version isn't the words — it's that it's three sentences. The words themselves are simple enough. I doubt there's one I haven't had cause to use within the past month or two. But Jesus Christ by the time you get to the seventh or eighth clause in a sentence it's just a pile of puzzle pieces waiting to be painstakingly assembled into a coherent thought.

Other way around I think

To be fair, English spelling already is pretty damn disconnected from pronunciation.

Also to be fair, two of those writing systems are entirely phonetic, and aren't that much bigger than our alphabet. It's really only Kanji that's the hard one.

Is there a fast way to write Kanji, akin to cursive, joined up Latin handwriting?

I'm always learning new words, and I had the nickname "human dictionary" in high school.

Outside of hearing brand new slang for the first time, t's pretty rare for me to come across an English word I don't already know. But if I were to read a dictionary cover-to-cover I would certainly find some. But those would be extremely rare and esoteric words, if I don't know them it's because I've never seen anyone use them.

People don't learn their native language by memorizing a dictionary. They learn it from being immersed in it their whole lives. When hearing a unknown word for the first time, if you understood every other word in the sentence then nine times out of ten you'll be able to infer the missing word from context.

Maybe sometimes you occasionally come across a rare word that's not obvious from context, but the longer you've been using a language the rarer this is - you get better at picking things up from context and it gets rarer how often you even encounter unknown words to begin with.

There will always be words out there you've never heard, but if they're rare enough for you to have never encountered them when using your native language your whole life, they might be rare enough for you to never encounter them in the future - unless you just read a dictionary to find them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Norse_language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language

Proto-Norse, or Ancient Nordic, was an Indo-European language spoken in Scandinavia that is thought to have evolved as a northern dialect of Proto-Germanic

I know it's all just different names for the same thing and I'm being a little facetious but all the modern Germanic languages, including Old Norse and it's descendants are derived from the reconstructed proto-Germanic language.

No, we don't know every single word.

But I think that isn't really what most people are actually shocked about with regards to kanji...

The thing that is shocking about kanji is "how do you even pronounce words you don't know? How do you even try to tell someone 'i saw this word I didn't know.' when it's a bespoke character for just that word?"

They don't realize that most kanji are built by combining different characters. So if you know the base characters that a kanji is built from. you can make a reasonable guess at pronunciation (and sometimes meaning) even if you've never seen the word before.

In English, we learn from a young age to "sound it out". At first glance, kanji makes no sense in that context. We can't understand how you would "sound out" a new kanji

So there are "root" kanji kind of like english root words?

Read and read dont rhyme.

Lead and lead dont rhyme.

Lead and Read sometimes rhyme but not always.

Only the cromulent words.

If you go to jisho.org which is a Japanese to English dictionary, down at the bottom right there's a button labeled "radicals". This allows you to search for kanji you don't know based on the "parts" of the kanji:

And if you look at a particular one like 族
it lists the parts that make it up

A test I took places me at 57001 words but I'm an insufferable know it all so that's that.

Oh cool! Thank you!

Yes, they're typically called "radicals" in Japanese learning circles, and other kanji can also be radicals. The whole system is fairly similar to root words and compound words, except that it scales much further up than English does.

For instance: two of "木" (tree, read as "ki") gets you "林" (woods, "hayashi"), adding a third is "森" (forest, "mori")

For another example: "三" (3, read as "san", it's also just 3 "1" kanji) with "口" (mouth, "guchi") as well as an extra dash at the top gives you "言" (say, "ii") whereas "千" (thousand, "sen") with "口" (see prior example) gives you "舌" (tongue, "shita"), and print both of those complete kanji together gets you "話" (speak/story, "hanashi")

The radicals and kanji used in both of these examples also have more meanings based on certain contexts and different readings, but these are useful ones for these examples.

Some of kanji and radicals combine in different ways, some of them change when they're used as radicals for other kanji, and sometimes certain kanji are used as radicals based on either their meaning or their pronunciation. There's plenty more examples of the very fractal/recursive nature of using radicals and kanji to build other kanji, but these were two that immediately came to mind.

Edit: I should also clarify that "radicals" as a Japanese linguistics term refers to the components of kanji, which 90-99% of the time refers to other kanji but sometimes includes symbols that on their own may not have any specific meanings or be otherwise usable on their own.

Many words are just awkward Cronenberg creatures made up of parts of other words, so even if I haven't heard a word before, it's often not hard to deduce it's meaning from context and components.

In university I learned a bunch of new words though, like inchoate, ameliorate, atavistic and suzerainty.

And reading old, old newspapers I learned of some great words that we just don't use anymore, like ultimo. Ultimo means "of last month" and it was used a lot in old papers because news travelled so slowly 200 years ago that often the papers were reporting on something that happened weeks ago. The article would read like "Banker John Stoakes and wife were waylaid and murdered by bushrangers on 17th ultimo, perpetrators known to constables were tracked northeast into dense scrub."

It's a great word, I want to see it come back.

A friend in high school had a tshirt that proclaimed "my vocabulary is over 80,000" but idk if it was backed up

Not to mention the >60% of Japanese vocabulary that's either borrowed from Chinese or composed from borrowed Chinese morphemes.

Not exactly what you are asking, but there have been several intentionally developed lists of words to help non-English speakers learn English, including BASIC English and Learning English. Most of these vocabulary lists are generally under 2,000 words, but over 1,000 words. Knowing these words, it is generally considered that you can start to have a discussion in English, either with a native speaker or with someone who also only knows these words.

I think that one thing which trips up a lot of alphabet based learners is that I can feel pretty close to knowing what a word sounds like by reading it even if I don't know what the word means. I don't know how I could do that in a logographic language.

Cromulent is acceptable. A very non-cromulent word would be irregardless.

It even passes spell checks. Without having no regard? When someone uses that word, they fail my litmus test for intelligence.

Another one that irks me is conversate. You mean converse?

For Japanese at least, there's 訓読み & 音読み in which the Kunyomi reading is the native Japanese way of pronouncing the Kanji while Onyomi is the pronunciation derivative from Mandarin, i.e. 戦う for "to fight" is read as たたかう via Kunyomi while 戦争 ("war") is read as せんそう bearing the Onyomi reading.

"awkward Cronenberg creatures" hahahaha

So true.

Well, when you have a population that can't digest Washington's prose...

No idea what mine is, but I feel parts of the drive holding the words have become inaccessible...

Oh interesting! I wonder if the nature of emoji combinations is intentionally like that.

First thing Ultimo made me think of

The difference between the systems can be summed up as:

English: read more words than they can speak.

Japanese: speak more words than they can write.

A native english speaker might use less than 15,000 words in common conversation. That same speaker in written communication can use 30,000 words and comprehend over 100,000 when reading.

In Japanese and other logographic languages, the verbal vocabulary is usually greater than the written one. A complete reversal of the pattern.

Here you go:

That sum up is OK, but I think it misses an asymmetry.

English: exists a ruleset one can learn to DERIVE a bidirectional mapping between a written word to a spoken word
(English sucks so the mapping ruleset is far from perfect)

Japanese: ?

Ultimo means “of last month” and it was used a lot in old papers because news travelled so slowly 200 years ago that often the papers were reporting on something that happened weeks ago.

And, importantly, they needed a word that was shorter than "of last month" due to printing constraints and costs. "Of last month" contains 13 characters, while "ultimo" is only 6.

A lot of words are born of necessity like that.

I'm more than content to use kana for readings of kanji, but I used romaji specifically because this was meant as an explanation for people who don't know much about Japanese as a language and so I would assume cannot read kana.

Considering its a language with thousands of years of history dating back to ancient Chinese I think at best it's difficult to say with certainty any sort of intentionality about how kanji as a system developed, but I believe that it makes sense from an almost evolutionary standpoint that kanji simplified into groupings of radicals (which often tell a sort of story that can help to memorize that kanji) would be better remembered and passed down through generations of use. Harder kanji or ones with more unique symbols are more likely to be misremembered or simplified for ease of memorization.

But this is all speculation on my part as I'm still learning the language as it currently exists, not so much the history of written Japanese.

Yeah, and I think it says something where languages seem to have gravitated towards an alphabet presentation when going through increases in literacy. The only major case I can think of where people have gone back to logographic language in an era of mass literacy has been with emoji, but that has become problematic as emoji gets used as slang since there isn't a universally accepted definition of some emoji.

Preventative now passes spell check as well, even though it just means preventive.

Using less while meaning fewer is one of my biggest irks.

Yes we have to know them all before the age of 12.

I'd argue that emoji aren't exactly logographic language, but just their own adjacent thing. Like when I was a kid and people still exchanged handwritten letters, they would have smiley faces, hearts, etc. Even before emojis came out, we had this in digital text with things like :D and <3

People have always done this stuff informally, and we still don't (to my knowledge) put emojis in contracts and laws and formal business writing.

For instance: two of “木” (tree, read as “ki”) gets you “林” (woods, “hayashi”), adding a third is “森” (forest, “mori”)

Oh hell yeah. This rules

It's not about the size, it's how you use it