My first anime was NGE. I knew all the words and still understand nothing.

> Coverage is the number most learning sites quote.

This person is visiting different learning sites then I do.

Also, I dont need to understand every word in sentence to understand it. Especially when coupled with visual show.

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.

I watched Lain with the subtitles on and I still won't claim I understood all the lines.

I'm pretty sure many of the lines are _not understandable by intent_, even.

"Present day... present time... ahahaha!"

I spam Yare Yare to the extent that my friends had it on my birthday cake

> kochira wa yakusoku no houshuu desu

You blurred yakusoku, everybody knows that, but houshuu is much rarer word, should have blurred that

That's higher than what I would've expected.

Reminds me of an analysis I did a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44349332

I didn’t include it in my analysis, but I’ve been thinking about “sentence coverage” vs “word coverage” for a number of years now. In an extreme case, you could imagine a transcript with only i+1/1T sentences and you’d be left with totally incomprehensible input.

Rare words usually carry the most information in any given sentence.

One thing that seem to be improving Japanese literacy across the world is Inmu gay porn meme contents. I believe it hasn't reached the US, but it is becoming eerily well known in East/Southeast Asian countries, including mainland China. It uses tiny set of vocabulary in highly repetitive manner, a la kid's picture books, but in the way relatable and addicting to social media users rather than e.g. portraying a day in the life of a cute crayon drawn caterpillar.

IMO, what that tells us is that a completely dumb repetition of small set of simple concepts to just set up the pathway can be an effective means to kickstart language acquisition process. Most language learning materials attempt to establish a compact set of rules to be expanded with a long tail of modular add-ons, even many that aims to create an alternative and less stressful approaches like Duolingo. The Inmu dictionary has less than 500 known expression, all unusable in regular communications and inappropriate in most settings, and the way it is used is simplistic, childish, disrespectful, and dumb. And I think that might be how "start with picture books" advice look like if rebuilt from first principles.

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).