A Web-accessible database of characteristics of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji

Abstract

Japanese kanji provides a stimulus-rich environment for research in the perceptual and cognitive processes required for reading, memory, and language acquisition in general. However, in order to do research on perceptual and cognitive processing using kanji, it is important to have a good understanding of the several potentially important differences between the Japanese writing system and other writing systems.The first difference between the Japanese writing system and others is that three different scripts are used in Japanese: kanji, hiragana, and katakana. Kanji originally developed from pictographs used by the Chinese thousands of years ago to represent objects and events in the world around them. Some of these kanji have retained their pictographic forms and remain similar in appearance to the objects that they were intended to represent. Those kanji-such as , meaning forest, , meaning gate, and , meaning storage-that have maintained their pictographic image well in the process of script development may be easier for nonnative Japanese learners to acquire by using an imagery mediation strategy, as was indicated by Kuwabara (2000). Later on, other kanji were formed to represent more abstract ideas, whereas still others developed using combinations of single characters that convey information about a related idea. A fourth type of kanji consists of elements that are related to pronunciation. Hiragana and katakana are scripts representing morae (slightly smaller units within syllables) to depict the same set of 46 basic sounds. Hiragana is used for grammatical inflections and words where the writing of kanji is avoided. Katakana is used to write words and names that are not of Japanese or Chinese origin. No further consideration will be given to hiragana and katakana in this paper or in the associated database.The second important difference between the Japanese writing system and others found in the world has to do with the number of basic kanji characters. In the version of kanji now in common use, there is a total of 1,945 basic characters. The difficulty associated with the mastery of this large set of characters is evident in the way the pedagogic load must be spread out over the first 9 years of schooling.The authors thank Shoichi Yokoyama and Sanseido (publishing company) for allowing the use of the kanji frequency data from Yokoyama, Sasahara, Nozaki, and Long (1998). In addition, much gratitude is given to the reviewer, Yasushi Hino, as well as to an anonymous reviewer of this paper, for their valuable suggestions. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to K. Tamaoka, International Student Center, Hiroshima University, 1-1, 1-chome, Kagamiyama, Higashihiroshima, Japan 739-8523 (e-mail: ktamaoka@hiroshima-u.ac.jp). In 1981, the Japanese government published a list of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji (Jooyoo Kanjihyo), including specifications of pronunciation. This list was established as the standard for kanji usage in print. The database for 1,945 basic Japanese kanji provides 30 ...

Frequency of occurrence for units of phonemes, morae, and syllables appearing in a lexical corpus of a Japanese newspaper

“…It is also surprising that /n/ was counted at an extremely high frequency of 35,719,268 times. When Japanese borrowed a variety of Chinese words, the special sound /n/ was heavily adopted to Japanese sounds (for details, see Tamaoka, 2003;Tamaoka, Kirsner, Yanase, Miyaoka, & Kawakami, 2002). In this sense, /n/ is no longer special with regard to frequency of occurrence.…”

New figures for a Web-accessible database of the 1,945 basic Japanese kanji, fourth edition

“…Although it is rather natural to expect a high correlation between single kanji frequencies and their lexical productivities, the correlations were lower than .700. Interestingly, the same figures of kanji lexical productivity were highly correlated at .639 ( p Ͻ .01) with the levels of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test for international students (M ϭ 1.69, SD ϭ 0.80; for details, see Aruku Nihongo Shuppan Henshuubu, 2000; Japan Foundation and Association of International Education, 1996;Tamaoka et al, 2002), and at Ϫ.666 ( p Ͻ .01) with school grades in which each kanji is taught in Japanese schools (M ϭ 5.33, SD ϭ 1.96). Stroke numbers of kanji (M ϭ 10.34, SD ϭ 3.76) showed a modest correlation at Ϫ.287 ( p Ͻ .01) with kanji lexical productivity.…”

“…Furthermore, the latest edition presents seven new figures for kanji characteristics: (1) kanji printed frequency in Row 10, (2) kanji lexical productivity in Rows 11-13, (3) accumulative kanji lexical productivity in Rows 14-16, (4) symmetry in Row 17, (5) kanji entropy in Rows 18 and 19, (6) kanji redundancy in Rows 20 and 21, and (7) numbers of meanings for On-readings in Row 26 and Kun-readings in Row 31. Since other figures and their related research issues were discussed at length in Tamaoka et al (2002), the present study focused on the aforementioned new figures and certain calculation formulas.…”

“…The second and third editions of the kanji database (for details, see Tamaoka et al, 2002) contained an index of kanji printed frequency from the three major daily newspapers (Asahi, Yomiuri, and Mainichi ) provided by the National Institute for Japanese Language (1976), and two more indexes of kanji frequencies in both the printed and the CD-ROM versions of the Tokyo edition of the Asahi newspaper in 1993, as provided by Yokoyama, Sasahara, Nozaki, and Long (1998). Pearson's correlations of printed frequencies for the 1,945 basic kanji (n ϭ 1,945) in the National Institute for Japanese Language (1976) were extremely high at .969 ( p Ͻ .01) for the printed version and .971 ( p Ͻ .01) for the CD-ROM version.…”

On the dynamics of the compounding of Japanese kanji with common and proper nouns∗

“…In previous articles (Tamaoka & Altmann, 2004; a database of 1945 basic kanji (Tamaoka et al, 2002;Tamaoka & Makioka, 2004) was used to show that Japanese kanji can combine with one another to different extents in order to build new compound words. For example the kanji ^ /gaku/, meaning in English 'to learn' or 'learning', can be used as the left-hand component of compounds such as A4si /gaQkoR/ (Q = a moraic geminate or voiceless obstruent and R -a moraic long vowel) 'school' /gakusei/ 'Student' /gakusya/ 'scholar' or as the right-hand component, as in /ryuRgaku/ 'study aboard' A^ /nyuRgaku/ 'school admission' /buNgaku/ (N -a moraic nasal) 'literature'…”