Knowing 86% of an anime's words may still leave you lost in 62% of its lines
With 86% of the words, you might understand only 38% of an anime's lines
Coverage — the share of spoken words you know — badly overstates comprehension. In Frieren, learning the 500 most common words gives 85.9% coverage but lets you follow only 38.4% of lines, since a line averages seven words and you need every one. Across eight shows, half the missed lines are just one unknown word short. Shows like Serial Experiments Lain need far fewer words than Jujutsu Kaisen.
At 85.9% coverage, your chance of knowing a whole line is about 35%. That's 0.859 multiplied by itself seven times.
- MichaelNolan
I’m not sure exactly where 85% coverage falls. But I can say that at 75% you will have essentially zero understanding of what a text says. (Context clues don’t help you here) And at 95% coverage you will be able to understand basically the entire text.
I don’t remember the source but here is the first page of Harry Potter with only 75% coverage:
> 75% coverage
_______ ONE
THE BOY WHO _____
Mr . and Mrs . Dursley , of ______ four , ______ _____ , were _____ to say that they were _________ ______ , _____ you very much . They were the last people you ' d ______ to be ________ in anything _______ or __________ , because they just didn ' t ____ with ____ ________ .
Mr . Dursley was the ________ of a ____ called _________ , which made ______ . He was a big , _____ man with ______ any ____ , ________ he did have a very large ________ . Mrs . Dursley was ____ and ______ and had nearly _____ the _____ ______ of ____ , which came in very ______ as she _____ so much of her time _______ over ______ ______ , ______ on the _________ . The Dursleys had a small ___ called Dudley and in their _______ there was no _____ boy ________ .
Here is a similar source https://thepatrologist.com/what-98-comprehensibility-looks-l...
- buzer
This ignores the fact that you can often figure out the meaning of the line from context even if you don't know the meaning of each word.
- Zigurd
I once ran an inadvertent experiment by installing Austrumi Linux, but not realizing that the default language is Latgallian. I'm fluent in Latvian, but I wondered if something had gone wrong with my brain. I could understand most of the words I was looking at, but more than half of the sentences I read were baffling.
- eqvinox
Err… it's not particularly good methodology to just consider words for Japanese. While it's true that a lot of kanji share pronunciations (and you thus can't identify them from hearing them on their own) you can still get at some compounds from context and "knowing 2 halves". (Kanji are quite frequently used in groups of 2 to form words, and a lot have only one reading when used in this manner. Personally speaking, I really need some context to get anywhere though.)
- ben_w
Sounds about right. Similar experience learning German when I moved to Berlin from the UK (though less extreme, felt like 85% of words was 50% of sentences).