On Mon, 28 Jul 1997, J. Austin Wilde and Bridget Ellen Engman wrote:

Jon Farber wrote:

Forgive me for my impudence, but I fail to see how that has any bearing at
all on whether or not he knows his kanji.  There are probably over five
hundred thousand different kanji, with only a fraction of them used
regularly.  Spirit wards would probably be a very specific kanji that few
outside of clergy would know.  You can't hold that against Ranma.  (I ask
you to recite the prayer for exocising a demon.  You can't, without
researching.)  That he was able to only miss one stroke, I feel, is a
testament to how intelligent Ranma is.

Okay.  A few points here.

4) And just for the record, Japanese does not use anywhere *near*
500,000 kanji.  There are 2,000 that are considered the essential kanji;
the number swells to 4 or 5,000 including archaic forms and characters
which only remain in names, not in linguistic use.  Chinese is, of
course, another story.

Just to be silly, there are an estimated 50,000 kanji in existance total.
Of those, the joyo kanji, of which there are 1945 are theoretically the
only ones you need to know in modern japan (besides a few more used only
for names) however the estimate that i've seen is that in order to be 
"literate" you should know a little over 3000, possible a little more,
depending on your profession. If you include all the kanji used in
specialized professions, that the total number in use (at least in japan)
is about 6000.

not that any of this really matters that much to the discussion at hand =)

Geoff Finger                 Harvey Mudd
aka Griffon                  Claremont, CA
LUAG -->   -=|=-=|=-=|=-=|=-=|=-=|=-    
http://www.cs.hmc.edu/~gfinger	New and Improved! :)