The 3002 Kanji characters you need to read a newspaper

If you’ve started learning Japanese you aught to know that there are basically 3 different characters sets you need to learn concurrently to best read Japanese text. 2 of them being the basic hiragana and katakana and the third being the many thousands of kanji characters. All the characters in Japanese are derivitive of Chinese characters, but only the kanji characters keep their original shape (for the most part) There are some exceptions. Their meanings and pronunciation however are usually very different.

Far from it for me to put any of you off learning Japanese to any level of fluency, but I thought I might show you the 3002 kanji characters you need to read a newspaper. Even knowing all of these 3002 kanji characters perfectly, you’d still only be able to read 99.97% of what’s written due to irregularities with written name kanji characters. Even Japanese people who have been speaking Japanese from birth have trouble with the more difficult newspapers, so don’t feel too bad.

From year 1 through to year 6 in Japanese primary schools, students are taught the first 1006 most commonly used kanji characters used in written texts called the ‘kyouiku kanji’, this knowledge, by the time you are 11 years old should enable you to be able to read 94.6% of a newspaper.

• 500 most common characters gives 80.7% comprehension
• 1000 most common characters gives 94.6% comprehension
• 2000 most common characters gives 99.72% comprehension
• 3000 most common characters gives 99.97% comprehension

3002 Kanji characters you need to read a newspaper

This isn’t even a complete list of kanji out there, there are upwards of 5000+ kanji characters in use today for various reasons so if you were to learn 1 a day perfectly, it would take you almost 14 years to learn 5000, and the problem with that is that nobody really actaually knows how many there are, so you’d most likely never learn them all.