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Comment by Bakary | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice site, but it's worth mentioning what exactly 90% coverage entails in practice. It's more painful than people might realize.

https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2016/08/25/what-80-...

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PERFECT. Exactly what it felt like trying to learn Japanese in my 30s going to class only 1-2x/week and having no native speakers to converse with daily. Being sort-of proficient or knowing XX% of kanji/vocab/etc sounds a lot more impressive than it is in practice!

At first I made a lot of progress. Eventually I got into the middle where every lesson taught me both some new small thing and opened an entire dimensions of other things I didn’t know.

I eventually settled on being a functionally illiterate holiday traveler with the vocabulary of a kindergartener.

I’m never going to work there, so this is as far as I’m going to go..

I have a few Japanese friends on social media.. When I travel to Japan, and especially in a situation where not in a hurry, I can entertain a taxi driver or make small talk with some older folk in a quieter town I am passing through.

In a cafe / pub in a city I can make a quick order in Japanese and if questioned for more detail I have to switch to English pretty quickly.

It’s a very humbling experience and everyone should try it. It gives you even greater respect for immigrants who come here and learn English... frequently speaking it better than native born!

Great article, thanks for sharing. I don't know if there's a technical concept/name for this, but I call it "legibility threshold" -- the threshold at which you are highly likely to be able to intuit the words/ideas you don't know, by the context. I think it's a valuable concept as it pertains to joining a new company/problem domain -- there are so many acronyms/words you don't know, and it takes time to hit the "legibility threshold" where everything starts to click.

I call it the "launchpad" because I can finally leave my native language behind and learn from consuming media directly.

Exactly. Just think about how bad OCR is when it gets 90% of the words right! With a 90% word accuracy rate, you have roughly between 0.5 and 1 error per sentence in a typical text. That's not great. The only reason we can interpret a text that's been OCR'ed at 90% accuracy is that humans are good at filling in what the right word should be in the face of a spelling mistake. If it put in random, nonsense words, we'd just struggle and say the OCR software was garbage.

The previous paragraph is 91 words. Imagine reading it with 9 random nonsense words in place of real English words.

Yeah, exactly. I passed N1 which requires ~2000 kanji, but I still frequently encounter words with kanji I haven’t encountered/don’t know the readings of.

A lot of meaning making is from understanding context. If you are familiar with a situation you can have near perfect comprehension where you only understand completely 80 of the words.

Thank you for that, that was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

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