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How To Find Out How Easy A Certain Japanese Text Would Be For You


Are you trying to up your Japanese reading skills? Have a set of electronic reading materials, but don't know which one to start with? One way to rate them is by how easy they would be for you to read, so you can pick the level you're comfortable with. To do that, you'll first need a text list of words you already know, and then use that as an input file to the Japanese Text Frequency Analyzer tool.

An easy way to get the list is to use the Morphman plugin in Anki (I'm assuming you're using Anki. Find out how to export the list if you use another SRS/flashcard system).


What you'll need:

Steps:
1. Ensure your database of known words is up to date by forcing a Morphman Recalc. You can do this by using the Anki tools menu or the default shortcut Ctrl+M.

If there are words you already know that are not in Anki, see this section of MorphMan Wiki. To make things easier for myself, I just imported a list of vocab (eg, JLPT N5 vocab) into Anki and marked them all as known + suspend them.

2. Next, open MorphMan Manager. Click on "Browse for DB A". By default it should show you the paths where the known.db, mature.db files etc are stored. 
Load known.db as DB A, and click on "A" to show the known morphemes (if the jargon is confusing, just think of morphemes as words).

3. Click on the pane, Ctrl+A to select all the text, and then paste it into a text file. Voila, you now have a text file containing a list of the words you know.

4. Open Japanese Text Analysis Tool. Put in the input file/directory, as well as where you want the output files to be. Enable user-based readability and use the text file created from step 3.
Basically your tool settings will look like something below. Then just click on Analyze!
Note: do not use Japanese characters in your file paths, it crashes the tool.


5. Then just open the output directory and check the reports. For more info on how to read the reports, check out the excellent tool documentation.



  

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