How Many Kanji Do You Need to Know?

The number you'll see quoted everywhere is 2,136. That's the size of the joyo kanji list, the set the Japanese government recommends for general use, and it's a reasonable finish line if you want to read newspapers and novels. It's a poor first target, though, because most of what people want to do with Japanese needs far fewer.

Here are the figures people usually mean when they ask, and where each one comes from. Only two of them are official.

The JLPT figures are running totals, so the 300 for N4 includes the N5 kanji.

2,136: the joyo kanji

The joyo kanji (常用漢字, じょうようかんじ) are the "regular use" characters. The current list dates from 2010, when 196 characters were added to the previous list of 1,945 and five were dropped. Government documents, newspapers and broadcasters use it as their baseline. A kanji outside the list is normally printed with its reading alongside, or the word gets written in kana instead.

Plenty of real text goes past it. Personal names can use several hundred extra characters from a separate list, the jinmeiyo kanji. A few everyday words are also commonly written with kanji that never made the list, such as 嘘 (うそ, a lie) and 噂 (うわさ, a rumor). Anyone who reads a lot ends up recognizing well over 2,136.

1,026: what children learn by age 12

The first 1,026 of the joyo kanji are assigned to the six years of elementary school. These are the kyoiku kanji (教育漢字, きょういくかんじ), and the curriculum fixes how many are taught each year: 80 in first grade, 160 in second, 200 in third, 202 in fourth, 193 in fifth and 191 in sixth. The remaining 1,110 come later. Students are expected to read most of them by the end of junior high school, and high school finishes the job.

The order suits children, not adult learners. First grade gets 山 (mountain), 川 (river) and 犬 (dog), while 私, the everyday word for "I", waits until sixth grade. That's why most courses for foreigners follow frequency or JLPT level instead of the school order.

It also puts the pace in perspective. Children who already speak the language take nine years or more to get through the list. Nobody needs to feel slow at three or five new kanji a day.

JLPT levels are estimates

The JLPT hasn't published kanji or vocabulary lists since the test was redesigned in 2010. The figures in the table come from the old test's specifications and from what textbook publishers have worked out from past exams, which is why one source says 80 kanji for N5 and another says 100. Treat them as sizes, give or take.

The steps aren't even. Going from N5 to N4 adds about 200 characters. Going from N2 to N1 adds about 1,000. The exam is also entirely multiple choice, so it checks that you can read a kanji inside a word and never asks you to write one by hand. If N5 is your target, our JLPT N5 kanji guide lists what to expect.

A few hundred kanji do most of the work

Kanji use is very uneven. A small group of characters, like 日, 人, 年, 大 and 一, turns up constantly, and a long tail of others appears a handful of times in a whole book. Counts based on newspaper text usually find that the 500 most frequent kanji account for somewhere around three quarters to 80 percent of all the kanji printed, and the top 1,000 for more than 90 percent. The exact percentages depend on what was counted (newspapers, novels and web text all differ), so take them as rough.

That's good news early on, since your first 500 pay off far more than your last 500. It's less comforting than it sounds. Coverage of 90 percent means one kanji in ten is still unknown, which works out to a gap in most sentences. And the rare characters tend to carry the specific meaning. In a news story the common kanji give you "person", "year" and "big", and the one you can't read is the word for what happened.

Knowing a kanji isn't knowing the word

Kanji counts measure the wrong unit. You read words, and a kanji you've studied can still show up in words you can't read. 生 is the usual example:

• 学生 (がくせい): student
• 生まれる (うまれる): to be born
• 生きる (いきる): to live
• 生ビール (なまビール): draft beer
• 一生 (いっしょう): a lifetime
• 誕生日 (たんじょうび): birthday

Six words, and 生 is read differently in every one of them.

Meaning can't always be guessed either. 切 is "cut" and 手 is "hand", but 切手 (きって) is a postage stamp. 大人 is read おとな (adult) and 今日 is きょう (today), and neither reading can be worked out from the parts. Why one character ends up with several readings is covered in on'yomi vs kun'yomi.

The same thing works in your favor. Once you know 電 (electricity), then 電車 (でんしゃ, train), 電話 (でんわ, telephone), 電気 (でんき, electricity or lights) and 電池 (でんち, battery) are all cheap to pick up. So count both. Someone with 1,000 kanji and a few thousand words built from them reads better than someone who has "finished" all 2,136 as single characters with one English keyword each.

Picking a number for your goal

• A trip to Japan. Hiragana, katakana and 50 to 100 kanji for signs: 入口 (いりぐち, entrance), 出口 (でぐち, exit), 駅 (えき, station), 円 (えん, yen), and 男 and 女 on restroom doors.
• Manga and games. Manga aimed at younger readers prints the reading in small kana beside every kanji, so you can start with a few hundred kanji and a dictionary. Vocabulary and grammar will hold you back before kanji do.
• Living or working in Japan. Around 1,000, roughly the elementary school set or N2, gets you through most signs, menus, forms and messages with the occasional lookup.
• Newspapers, novels and N1. The full joyo list, and you'll keep meeting new characters after that.

As for pace, five new kanji a day gets you through 2,136 in about 14 months. Three a day takes roughly two years. Both assume you keep up with reviews, which is where the time really goes, because every kanji you add has to come back several times before it stays. The best way to learn kanji goes through how to build a routine around that.

Common questions