或る女

有島武郎 · 150,123 characters · 1,255 paragraphs

HOW HARD THE WRITING IS

Newspaper kanji

The characters a newspaper uses, at ordinary sentence length. Comfortable once the common two thousand words are familiar.

How this is counted

The characters a newspaper uses, at ordinary sentence length. Comfortable once the common two thousand words are familiar.

  • How much of the page is kanji28% of the script on the page · 23% of this band
  • How long the sentences run39 characters per sentence · 19% of this band
  • How late those kanji are taught3.1 on a 1–8 scale of school year, where 7 is the rest of the common list and 8 is outside it · 23% of this band
  • Kanji outside the common list16% of the distinct kanji · 12% of this band
  • How often the words are uncommon10% of the words the corpus ranked sit past the common bands, counting the middle bands as half · 22% of this band

Its 1,878 different kanji, by when they are taught

49%
Taught in primary school — the 教育漢字.
34%
Taught later at school — the rest of 常用漢字.
16%
Not on the common list — name characters, and characters outside 常用漢字 altogether.

Counted over the 1,878 different characters the book uses, each once — not over how often you meet them, so a character used once weighs the same as one used on every page. The five bars higher up count kanji two different ways: “How late those kanji are taught” counts every appearance, so the characters on every page weigh most, while “Kanji outside the common list” is the last figure in this chart, counted the same each-character-once way. The published list placed 90% of those 1,878 characters. The rest are counted as outside 常用漢字, which is what absence means in a complete list — so the smaller that figure, the more of this chart is the list's gaps rather than the book's.

Counted over 140,782 characters of Japanese script and 87,282 words as they appear on the page, of which 50,604 appear in the frequency list behind this. The rest are not counted rather than rare: the list only reaches so far.

Tatoeba Japanese sentence export (tatoeba-jpn): 32980 lexemes over 2497247 counted words. Short, learner-contributed conversational sentences, largely translated from English. Not prose.

Which kanji it uses was judged against a published list of 2,999 characters and the school year each one is taught in. “The common list” above is 常用漢字, the characters Japanese schooling covers; a character the list places outside those school years — a name character, or one it does not carry at all — counts as outside it. “How late those kanji are taught” counts every time a character appears, so the characters on every page weigh most; “Kanji outside the common list” counts each different character once, however often the book uses it.

7,128
distinct words
in the whole book

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WHAT THESE NUMBERS ARE COUNTED OVER

Counted over 87,282 word occurrences that resolve to a dictionary entry, 89% of everything the parser found in this text. The rest is punctuation, numerals and names, which have no dictionary entry to know. A compound like 高校生 is counted as its parts, because that is how it is carded.

FIRST LINES

新橋を渡る時、発車を知らせる二番目の鈴が、霧とまではいえない九月の朝の、煙った空気に包まれて聞こえて来た。葉子は平気でそれを聞いたが、車夫は宙を飛んだ。そして車が、鶴屋という町のかどの宿屋を曲がって、いつでも人馬の群がるあの共同井戸のあたり…

WHERE THIS TEXT CAME FROM

Transcribed and proofread by volunteers at 青空文庫, and reproduced here under the terms of its 図書カード, which records the edition this was set from and who checked it.

There is no “how much you would know at 2,000 words” figure yet: nothing here counts a book against a size of vocabulary, and a guess would be worse than the gap.

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