How many kanjis do the Japanese people need to know in order to read, write, and speak their own language? One of the biggest concerns and “headaches” of learning Japanese is the Chinese characters that the language uses, known as kanjis.
How many kanji are there?
Children in Japanese schools must learn 1006 basic characters, the kyōiku kanji, before finishing the sixth grade. This list is a subset of a larger list that was implemented by the Ministry of Education of Japan in 1945.
This list is called jouyou kanji (常用漢字), which literally means common-use Chinese ideograms. Currently, this list of necessary ideograms has about 2136 kanji for the level of fluency in Japanese. This larger list of characters must be mastered by the end of school. Students learn through repetition methods.
In total, it is believed that there are more than 5000 Chinese ideograms in the Japanese language. Over the years, these ideograms have fallen out of use and have been replaced by other words written in hiragana, with other kanji, or even international words written in katakana. Knowing 2000 kanji is more than enough to be fluent in the Japanese language.
Do the Japanese know all the kanji?
It is said that the Japanese do not know all the jōyō kanji, which are the most advanced, as some of them are rarely used in everyday life, and although they learned them in school, the rare use of some kanji causes the Japanese to forget these characters. Depending on the profession, a Japanese person may or may not know all these characters.
- A factory worker, for example, certainly will not know/remember all;
- A biologist or doctor may know more of these kanjis;
Now, someone who works in the field of education, literature, or any area of the humanities will know almost all these kanjis due to the fact that they deal with these rarely used characters.
However, in texts and newspapers, the rarely used characters contain furigana to facilitate reading for those who do not know them. A well-educated Japanese person can read 3000 kanjis or more. A PhD holder can probably reach up to 5000, especially if related to their field of study.
More than 5000 is possible, but many kanjis would be extremely rare, making it even harder to remember them. In reality, we should not worry about the number of ideograms in the Japanese language. We shouldn’t even count how much we have learned. Just focus on learning words, and deciphering an unknown kanji will become easy with the help of your radicals.
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