Quote:
Originally Posted by jbradfor
@columbine: thanks for the list. That's not too far from what I was looking for, and it's already in table format, so it should be pretty easy to parse out into a format for a flash card program.
@CityofTrees: I meant to mention in my first posting that I'm studying Chinese and know about 1500 characters. I realize that kanji is not quite the same as Chinese (e.g. some characters are written differently, many characters have different meanings), but I don't fear kanji  I was surprised, however, to see that much kanji in food words. In my previous (and only) trip to Japan, I was expecting to have some vague idea of menus by reading the kanji. However, I was very disappointed and surprised to find almost no kanji on the menus. Does this not match other peoples' experience? |
No that's pretty standard to find menu's without lots and lots of kanji. Don't forget, there are people in Japan who struggle with them, and school kids who haven't learnt them all so excepting very traditional high-end restaurants, most provide simple kanji and hiragana to make life easier. You might also want to learn katakana as things like drinks (coffee and non-sake alcohols for example) are often listed in 'kana.