The Order and Amount of Kanji to Study

Once you know why to study kanji, how NOT to study kanji, and how to study kanji, the next question is how many kanji to study and in what order?

The key to figuring out the order and amount to study goes back to the reason why you are studying kanji in the first place: to build kanji-meaning associations that allow you to engage with native Japanese content. This means that it’s best to study the kanji that are going to be most useful to know: the kanji that occur most frequently in common Japanese.

There are 2136 kanji characters that are officially designated as commonly used, or Jōyō kanji 常用漢字(じょうようかんじ). If you go through the Japanese education system, you will learn 1026 of these Jōyō kanji by the time you complete elementary school (the Kyōiku kanji), and round out the remaining 1110 by the time you complete high school. (Don’t worry about the timeline here – if you are studying kanji correctly, you will get through all these kanji in a matter of months.)

Studying significantly more kanji beyond the 2136 Jōyō kanji that are taught in the Japanese school system is going to be more harmful than helpful, as you are less likely to encounter high-frequency non-Jōyō kanji as you begin your foray into reading native Japanese content.

Note: While the Jōyō kanji are a good approximation of the most useful kanji, there are a number of kanji that frequently occur in written Japanese that are not included in the set of Jōyō kanji (e.g., “伊,” which means “Italy”). Including these high-frequency kanji takes the total amount of commonly used kanji to around 2,200. Ashiba’s kanji program includes these additional high-frequency non-Jōyō kanji.

All in all, that means you should limit your kanji study to a maximum of around 2,200 characters. But once you know the total number of kanji that you should study, the next thing is to figure out which kanji to learn first and what kanji learning order to follow. This is a somewhat tricker question. On the one hand, it doesn’t really matter the order you choose, as long as you end up studying the relevant kanji.

But at the end of the day, you want to learn the kanji in the order that is most useful. For the most part, it is most useful to prioritize learning kanji by how frequently they occur in native Japanese, as these are the kanji you will see the most often. However, when you start out with zero kanji knowledge, it is actually most useful to study the Kyōiku kanji in the order taught in Japanese elementary school before learning the remaining kanji in order of frequency. This is because the Kyōiku kanji are taught in an order that makes it easy to remember new kanji.

For instance, the first characters taught in elementary school are the numbers, starting with “一” (“one”), “二,” (“two”) and “三” (“three”). By teaching the kanji in a logical sequence, the study order itself makes individual kanji easy to remember. Other smart ordering includes teaching kanji with conceptual opposites, such as “大” and “小,” which mean “big” and “small.”

Because the Kyōiku kanji are ordered in a way that makes it easier to remember new kanji, following this order will allow you to build kanji-meaning associations more quickly. This in turn will allow you to get through your kanji study more quickly and onto reading native Japanese content, which is the goal.

However, once you learn the Kyōiku kanji, it is best to prioritize kanji by frequency of occurrence, not by the official ordering of the Japanese education system. This is because the Jōyō kanji excludes some high-frequency kanji, and because the official order begins to teach words that are “nice-to-haves” over essential kanji.

In fact, you will begin to see that you learn some markedly less useful kanji in order to get the benefits of smart ordering even as you approach the end of the Kyōiku kanji. For instance, in Grade 6 (the final Kyōiku grade) you will learn “蚕,” which means “silkworm.” This is the 2272th most frequent kanji, and barely worth learning before you’ve started reading native Japanese content. Meanwhile, you will not yet have learned “違,” which means “difference,” and is the 344th most frequently occuring kanji.

Because the benefits of smart ordering are outweighed by the costs of avoiding common kanji, it’s therefore best to avoid studying kanji in Jōyō order after you learn the first 1026 kanji. Starting with your 1027th kanji, you should begin prioritizing by frequency of occurrence as this will then be the most useful order to continue your study.

This is the order that Ashiba uses to teach the kanji. But whether you choose to use Ashiba or not, making sure you prioritize useful kanji should guide your kanji study.