97 bottles of beer on the wall

Today is day 23 of my challenge marking word 1150 and just over 19% complete.  My actual word count minus leeches (words I couldn't learn this time around) is 2577 or 32% of the complete JLPT vocabulary list.  I'm very satisfied with my progress after about 16 months of Japanese study.  I don't mean to sound like a braggart because I believe that this is simply evidence of the number of hours I've studied and not some silly metric of intelligence.  I truly hope my progress reports encourage other people to study language as well.

I have a lot of ideas for new posts but I've been completely engrossed by the challenge.  This weekend should allow me the time to write about something other than progress reports.  My last post was on an interesting topic but I lost steam at the end and feel like I failed to make a solid argument.  I'm looking forward to trying again.

This weeks calculations are about Kanji readings.  The question I asked myself was how many new Kanji readings do I need to learn at different intervals of my challenge.  Basically I looked at where I currently stand with readings and the number of readings I'll have entering the JLPT 2 list.

Until this year there were 4 levels in the JLPT test.  There are now 5 levels.  The changes are mainly to more evenly distribute the difficulty curve because there were many complaints about the gap between levels 3 and 2.  Personally I don't think there's much use in having an official test easier than the level 2 exam.  It won't help you get a job nor will it get you into any Japanese Universities.  I won't digress any further into the structure or utility value of the exam except to say that I'm using a list published from a few years back.

When I restarted my computer I forgot to save the stats I calculated so here are the estimates from memory.  There are roughly 2,000 Kanji in the complete list of JLPT vocabulary words.  When I started my challenge I had learned all 1406 words on the level 3 and 4 exams plus a few hundred words from levels 1 and 2.  I never calculated my number of known readings before the challenge.  According to my analysis of the level 3, 4, and partial level 1 list that I've completed I can now read somewhere around 1,300 characters.  This leaves me with around 700 new readings in order to complete my challenge.  I'm currently 52% of the way through the level 1 word list.  In order to complete the remaining 48% I will learn about 350 new readings.  Once I've completed the level 1 list the final leg of my challenge is to tackle the level 2 list.  The reason for completing the level 1 list first was pretty arbitrary.  It's supposed to be more difficult although I'm not sure if that's true or not.

The JLPT 2 list contains 3690 words.  I've calculated that in order to complete this list I will only have to learn an additional 350 Kanji readings.  I felt very relieved when I derived this number.  I'm rapidly approaching the point of diminishing returns on Kanji readings!  I figure that once I've reached 3,000 readings I'll be able to read 99% of printed material and 100% of newspaper articles.  If you guessed that my primary objective with Japanese is to read fluently then you guessed correctly.  I can't wait to sit down and read a newspaper!