How many joyo kanji are there

My answer does not address the issue of including Jinmeiyo kanji. Improve this answer. Just to clarify, this appears to be a query of jouyou kanji that only have one jouyou onyomi, right? They may have non-jouyou readings. I'm not sure if that meets the criteria imagined by the OP or not. But I will edit the answer to clarify. This is a very, very helpful answer. Thank you. I will look into this site and try to learn how to use it for future inquiries though it seems a little technical.

The good news is that there are far fewer multi-onyomi Kanji than I thought. That helps. Personally, I always found the kun-yomi more troublesome because many of them have multiple readings which are important to know and are difficult to remember how to read. Show 5 more comments. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. Sign up using Facebook. Sign up using Email and Password. Post as a guest Name. Pronunciations were also debated.

And dig further into the new kanji feast at www. Quiz: Match the following food and drinks, all containing one or two new joyo kanji candidates, with their meanings and pronunciations below. Current joyo kanji are in bold.

Answers: 1. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right. With your current subscription plan you can comment on stories. One is that some kanji carry multiple related meanings, so when using the kanji in one definitional sense, you use one reading, versus another.

Another complication is, in my opinion, even more interesting if no less frustrating. As Chinese words joined the Japanese lexicon, they came over from different regions of China, with different dialects. They also came over at different times, sometimes separated by centuries. As the different pronunciations arrived in Japan, they simply got appended to the list of possible readings. This is especially interesting because Japanese has acted like a sort of time capsule for researchers of classical Chinese phonetics.

Pretty neat! When do you use onyomi and when do you use kunyomi? Kunyomi is typically used when the word has kana attached to it to make a word. Onyomi is for when the character stands alone or with other kanji. But even that bit of info only gets you so far. Because of multiple readings of kanji, your 2, journey to kanji-fluency is actually many times more difficult.

But does it stop there? Oh no…. Once you can recognize them, you can start combining them. If you can write it, even better. A truly robust understanding of kanji would be knowing at least one kunyomi and one onyomi of each kanji although some have only reading, fyi , preferably within the context of a bit of vocabulary.

Writing kanji on a computer uses a sort of auto-complete system. You type out the way a kanji sounds, and the options for all kanji with that reading show up in a dropdown menu. We can do better it turns out. I did a review a while back about WaniKani , which is a great resource for many people for learning kanji. The premise is simple. Learn some super-simple radicals.

Then learn a bunch of super-simple kanji that use those radicals. Then learn some compound words that use those kanji. Then rinse and repeat with harder radicals and more complex kanji.

Do that over and over for a while and viola! My personal favorite system comes from a book I mentioned earlier in this post.

This is, in my humble opinion, the best resource out there for learning kanji. It introduces kanji to you in the perfect way, balancing simplicity , frequency , and similarity. That is to say, he starts by showing you frequent, simple kanji, and groups all the kanji that seem similar.