2200 Kanji Usage Frequency List

[u/Connect_Track1284]

Some good news for people interested in kanji usage frequencies. I have finally completed the compilation of a datafile containing frequency numbers for 2,200 kanji across 14 different sources, covering domains such as Google, Wikipedia, novels, Netflix subtitles, Japanese newspapers, and many more. I have published the Excel file with all the relevant data on my ResearchGate profile. I am going to publish an academic article related to this document soon (early 2027 or so), and I hope it will inspire people to pursue and advance research in this area.

A few interesting points that might be worth pointing out here are related the following: 1) unexplored domains and domains with obsolete data; 2) practical implications linked with inconsistent sources; 3) overlap with popular kanji lists, such as kyōiku and jōyō, or Heisig’s RtK and Tokuhiro’s textbook 日本語学習のためのよく使う順漢字2200.

unexplored domains and domains with obsolete data

Despite the extensive coverage of various domains among the 14 sources, a few unexplored domains still remain. These include the kanji usage in manga, games, and, most importantly, real-life settings, such as street posters, billboards and signs, restaurant menus, supermarkets, department stores, and many other types of locations in public places. This kind of research could be conducted through the use of OCR technology, although there are challenges to be dealt with.

Additionally, some currently available data could be regarded as obsolete. This is especially the case for sources gathering data from newspaper articles, many of which date back to the previous century. Many sources also collect data from freely available repositories, such as Aozora Bunko, which are dominated by novels published in the 20^th century. The same applies to kanji usage frequency data from Japanese magazines.

practical implications linked with inconsistent sources

Usage frequency seems to be a minor factor among the 1,000 most frequent kanji regardless of the source. In other words, whether you learn the 1,000 most frequent kanji in news or novels, makes a relatively small difference (i.e., around 100). However, the situation changes for lower-frequency kanji, where the difference more than doubles, depending on the number of additional kanji. For example, if you learn 1,200 kanji beyond the 1,000 most frequent from a source whose data cover a specific single domain, such as Wikipedia or older novels, around 23% of the new kanji you encounter probably do not belong to the 2,200 most frequent in general. As a result, you might end up learning hundreds of characters (1,200/4 = 300) that are domain-specific (naturally, there is nothing wrong with this approach).

overlap with popular kanji lists

This might be the most interesting of the three parts. Many people still believe that Japanese children in elementary schools learn kanji according to usage frequency, but the overlap between the set of 1,026 kyōiku kanji and the 1,026 most frequent kanji identified from the 14 sources is only 83%. Even if we assume that some of the 1,026 kanji identified as the most frequent are not, at least 10% of the kanji Japanese children are supposed to acquire during the primary education are not commonly used in Japanese.

The resulting list of 2,200 kanji greatly overlaps with the jōyō list and Heisig’s 2,200-kanji list in RtK (around 95% for both). However, if someone were to learn only the first 1,500 kanji from RtK, these would cover only 70% of the 1,500 most frequent kanji. If we compare this with Tokuhiro’s textbook, in which the kanji are ordered primarily based on usage frequency, there is a 24% difference in coverage. Consequently, a learner using Tokuhiro’s textbook to learn the first 1,500 kanji would have knowledge of around 300 more kanji than a learner using Heisig’s RtK in terms of raw accumulated frequency.

 

Further information will be provided in the article, which should be published during 2027. Thanks for your thoughts and feedback, and have a pleasant weekend!

[u/tapir720]

a seperate list with the non-jouyou kanjis or a "x-hundred most usefull non-jouyou kanji"-list would be interesting to have. The jouyou-list is pretty straightforward but having some guidance for kanjis going beyond that would be handy i guess

[u/IntroductionSea2159 → u/tapir720]

At some point I need to find one of those lists for useful non-jouyou kanji. 串 comes to mind as a useful one.

Not yet though, still working through the jouyou ones.

[u/Connect_Track1284 → u/IntroductionSea2159]

well, for start you can identify some useful non-joyo by comparing this list of 2200 kanji with the 2136-kanji joyo list ... there is a pretty good reason why you don't have a general list of, lets say, 500 most frequent non-joyo, and what I wrote refers to that reason ... cross-domain deviations of lower-frequency kanji progressively increase with decreasing usage frequencies, so 500 most frequent non-joyo in medicine texts are going to have maybe 10% overlap with 500 most frequent non-joyo in manga or politics ... nonetheless, maybe you will appreciate the work by Ogura & Aizawa (2007), who provided a list based on their exploration of magazines from 2000s

[u/tapir720 → u/Connect_Track1284]

yeah domain specificity is surely a limiting factor in general applicability but i would divide it in two rough categories nonetheless; News and literature.

News and newspaper articles use a lot of domain specific terms from a broad range of fields but they are still regarded as part of a general knowledge for a well informed and educated person. So there's some kind of common ground independent of individual interests or specialization

Then there is literature which uses more flowery and descriptive language and probably also touches on more culture relevant concepts. Makes probably the most sense to sub-divide this category into classical and contemporary literature

So for me the main question is more like whats your goal? General knowledge or Arts and literature?

I personaly just farmed words as i encountered them and subsequentialy picked up the individual kanji. I never gave much about frequency lists as a learning roadmap but it would still be interesting to me to gauge the scope of the kanji knowledge of a person with a deep general knowledge.

[u/Grunglabble]

I somewhat think frequency is not a great heuristic for deciding what to learn (or in what order), if that is the aim here.

You mention Heisig but obviously heisig is not written for you to learn part of its contents, its written for you to learn its entire contents in what he considered an easier more pedagogical ordering (regardless of whether it is the best, it is at least not arbitrary).

Equally, kanji have different weights even besides how complex one may look. Does it have a consistent obvious meaning, or a abstract, hard to understand meaning, or many meanings, or many pronunciations, unexpected pronunciations. In other words, is that kanji one frequently occuring thing or 10 different much less frequent things? When you learn a kanji, which thing are you learning, and how costly is it to learn it out of context at your level?

[u/Connect_Track1284 → u/Grunglabble]

Of course, using frequency alone to decide the order in which kanji should be taught is generally not a good approach. However, I'd argue that insufficient data about kanji usage frequencies are the main cause for this. Imagine, you're a tourist and you want to learn 100 kanji to be able to get around in Japan, and someone would offer you four kanji lists with different 100 kanji in different order: 1) first 100 kanji from the kyoiku list for Japanese kids in elementary schools; 2) first 100 kanji from a popular kanji textbook; 3) first 100 kanji based on extensive research of kanji usage in public spaces; 4) first 100 kanji from RtK which contains many low-frequency kanji right from the start. I'd choose the third option, but the issue is that it doesn't currently exist. Another example would be a bit more specific, but's let's say you're visiting Japan in a few months as a foreign medical science researcher and you want to learn 500 kanji that are the most useful for your particular needs. Surely, you'd prefer a list based on 500 kanji most frequently used in medicine texts compared to any other list, right?

On the other hand, I completely agree that if you are determined to learn 2000+ kanji from the start, RtK is a much better choice than a purely frequency-based ordering. However, the tricky part is that learning more than 1500 kanji individually is not a very effective approach to language acquisition, as, at that point, it's more effective to acquire new kanji through vocabulary. With the knowledge of 1500 kanji, you should be able to easily recognize more than 96% of all kanji within a text, so you should be reading authentic Japanese texts rather than spending weeks or months learning additional 700 kanji from RtK, which will increase your kanji recognition rate from 96% to 99%. Nothing wrong with that though, if you have time to do that and if you enjoy the process of using RtK even after mastering 1500 kanji.

[u/furyousferret]

Does it cover readings as well? There's always value in that as you look at a kanji and its readings, many Joyo have readings that just aren't worth memorizing.

I used to think it was just 'Master all the Joyo Kanji' but its not even that, supposedly of the 4400 readings only 3000 are common.

I'm looking forward to your paper.

[u/Connect_Track1284 → u/furyousferret]

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357163811_Joyo_Kanji_Readings_ver_11

Probably not exactly what are you're looking for, but might be helpful. The most-frequent word method to determine the category of usage might seem a bit dubious, but it works very well in the vaaast majority of cases. I also wrote an article "How Many Jōyō Kanji Readings Are Rarely Used?" available at the link below

https://fphil.uniba.sk/fileadmin/fif/katedry_pracoviska/kvas/SOS_22_1/SOS_22_1.pdf

[u/Caffdy]

I think you should really consider to include kanji from anime/manga/light novels, it's one of the most popular reasons people learn the language I'm sure

[u/rakkosnacko → u/Caffdy]

There's already https://jiten.moe/frequency-dictionaries which does this, although kanji frequency is only global. 

If OP has useful ideas for improvements, Jiten has a discord and the code is open source.

[u/Connect_Track1284 → u/rakkosnacko]

looks promising, will check the data more thoroughly in upcoming days, thanks 👍

[u/tapiokatea]

For more real life data, LINEチラシ might be pretty useful. Supermarkets, restaurants, local stores, etc all upload shop posters and other printed materials so people can digitally browse coupons, discounts, or ongoing campaign announcements. It's searchable by location. You do need a japanese line account to see it though.

[u/Connect_Track1284 → u/tapiokatea]

thank you for the recommendation :)

[u/Frog17000000]

Real-life settings は, the frequency of writing is separate from the frequency of reading. 出 is always way underrepresented in these frequency lists for example. A kanji can be written once and read many many times (出口). The frequency count should count each time your eyes scan over a piece of text. And this will be highly multimodal based on the different kinds of lives people live, where they live, what they do for work and fun, etc. Not that it can't be done, but it's harder than the written frequency case, not just from a technological point but the analysis too.

That's just the conclusion I came to making my anki deck which is frequency based both in kanjis and then for the vocab list of each kanji, which you might be interested in https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1766033327. I'd love for it to be reading frequency based too but yeah that's not very doable right now.

[u/-SMartino]

You know what, man. I don't know shit about fuck, but!

I am looking forward to your paper.

if nothing else, out of  genuine academic curiosity.

[u/stonecannon]

Very cool, thanks for sharing it!