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.
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.
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.
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: ?
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.
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.
That’s a good point, but I do think some would qualify as being logographic since you kinda DO have to know, like what 🍆 means.
But, that instance makes me realize it might be possible to infer meaning via context like with any other word in any other language: 👨👧🫦👅🍆💦
Which actually makes me think I’m not really comprehending the practical realities of Japanese
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.