Not from the recent post, no. But looking at lists like that years ago did get me to fill in gaps in my kanji knowledge, and it made me far more confident reading whatever I want now.
If you use Anki, the add-on [Kanji Grid](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/909972618) is awesome as you can see what kanji you already know under various categories, including JLPT levels, school levels, Kanken levels, etc. I check mine every few days and it always give me a huge boost when I completely fill in a subcategory.
I’ve been studying for almost 2 months now so it wasn’t like a wake up call for me but it made me realize the awfully long way i have ahead, but i was happy when i recognized 85% of the first and second grade kanjis
More or less. I already know that my weaker point is reading/kanji.
I recently decide to work more on that aspect and started using jpdb to reviewing vocabulary and kanji. Right now I am at 333 kanji that are identified as known, it might not be all the one I know as I might not have reviewed kanji that I know.
Just looking quickly at the list by grade, I know that I am a bit all over the place, like I know some from grade 6 but some from grade to I have no idea. So as I am not studying by school grade, that is a bit useless.
For me the wake up call is when I see that to fully read a game that I want to play, I need to know 482 kanji and I just know 1/3 of that.
Being able to put a real number on how many kanji you know is really telling, then put in in perspective to real work of fiction that use a bit over 2000 kanji in a book and close to 3000 for a series… then yeah, I know I still have a lot to learn.
Editing this comment a little since its clear from below I didn’t communicate it very well originally.
there is no such thing as “knowing” a kanji. It’s not a very good metric for measuring anything. A common beginner problem is people will read rtk and learn a bunch of keywords/vague meanings for joyo kanji, think they know all of Japanese, then open up a simple book and they can’t read anything. why?
1) kanji often have completely different meanings/readings when used in isolation and in compound words. As I stated below, >if you knew the words “似合う” and “鍵,“ that would probably not be sufficient for you to guess the meaning of “合鍵.”
If you simply say “I will learn this kanji” and only learn 1 reading and 1 meaning, you’re not doing anything but dunning-krugering yourself into thinking you know more than you already do.
2) Nobody agrees on what it means to “know” a kanji anyway, so it’s a pretty useless definition. Measurement metrics are good when they’re as objective as possible.
**If you were in a language class, and the teacher passed out just a list of 50 kanji and said “learn these by next week because they will be on the test” with no other context, you and the other students would understandably be pretty upset, precisely because everyone has a different interpretation of what that means. Whereas if they said “learn these 100 vocab words which contain these 50 kanji,” that would be much more clear and reasonable.**
3) Set clear goals for yourself when you try to learn stuff. “I will learn 100 words next week” is a good, clear, objectively measurable, and concrete objective. “I will learn 10 kanji next week” is pointless because you won’t find two people in this subreddit who agree as to what that means.
**tl;dr:** don’t study kanji in isolation without vocab words, set clear goals when you try to learn stuff, kanji dont always mean the same thing when they’re on their own or in compound words.
Anyone interested in testing their kanji ability can look at https://jiken.herokuapp.com/ – you might find your knowledge isn’t entirely restricted to the grade list
Going through 5th and 6th grade now. Most of the kanji is related to stuff they would start seeing in history or science books. That not to say we won’t see or use them ever but often when reading a book I find most of my unknow kanji is middle school level.
Yes! Bought a few books lol
I knew my kanji knowledge was terrible, but lists like that are completely irrelevant to me. What decides if your kanji knowledge is good or not is if you’re able to understand what you’re reading, which I fail pretty hard at.
As someone studying for the N2 exam, Kanji/vocab take up most of my time. I’ve gotten A LOT BETTER but when it comes to reading the news I still have a long way to go.
It really makes me realize how even at N2 level you really don’t have a whole lot of knowledge about this language. A long time ago I heard someone say that “you don’t start learning Japanese until after you’ve passed N1” and honestly, the more I study the more I believe it.
What list are you referring to?
I track my kanji knowledge using the Kanji Grid add-on that /u/jarrabayah mentioned. In the beginning I tracked based on JLPT, but after a little while I tracked compared to grade school level because I found it was much better for estimating the difficulty level (in comparison to my knowledge) of various media.
Personally I think tracking by grade is a much better way of actually checking your Japanese knowledge. Tracking by JLPT is fine, but understand that in that case you’re comparing yourself to a test so it’s harder to guess the difficulty level of various literature or shows.
Honestly, unless you’re trying to pass an exam to get into university or work in Japanese, I don’t think that matters too much. As long as you know the kanji relevant to you at your current stage of learning, that’s the most important thing, in my opinion.
There are a lot of 常用 kanji I didn’t know for literal *years* because they never came up in any content I was interested in at the time. A lot of plant and fish kanji fall into this category, for example. I’ve been reading Japanese novels for over a year without major issues when I first came across 朴, which is technically a 常用 kanji, for example.
As you get better the amount of topics you interact with will naturally broaden and you will learn more kanji (and more importantly words!) than you knew before. No need to rush, take the journey one day at a time.
Derp 🙁
Not really. It’s just a list, which means with time and effort, you can memorize it! Start with Anki!
Not really. I already know I don’t know any Kanji. Hell, I only just memorized Hiragana and Katakana.
It does give me some memorization guidelines to study from tho’.
15 comments
Not from the recent post, no. But looking at lists like that years ago did get me to fill in gaps in my kanji knowledge, and it made me far more confident reading whatever I want now.
If you use Anki, the add-on [Kanji Grid](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/909972618) is awesome as you can see what kanji you already know under various categories, including JLPT levels, school levels, Kanken levels, etc. I check mine every few days and it always give me a huge boost when I completely fill in a subcategory.
I’ve been studying for almost 2 months now so it wasn’t like a wake up call for me but it made me realize the awfully long way i have ahead, but i was happy when i recognized 85% of the first and second grade kanjis
More or less. I already know that my weaker point is reading/kanji.
I recently decide to work more on that aspect and started using jpdb to reviewing vocabulary and kanji. Right now I am at 333 kanji that are identified as known, it might not be all the one I know as I might not have reviewed kanji that I know.
Just looking quickly at the list by grade, I know that I am a bit all over the place, like I know some from grade 6 but some from grade to I have no idea. So as I am not studying by school grade, that is a bit useless.
For me the wake up call is when I see that to fully read a game that I want to play, I need to know 482 kanji and I just know 1/3 of that.
Being able to put a real number on how many kanji you know is really telling, then put in in perspective to real work of fiction that use a bit over 2000 kanji in a book and close to 3000 for a series… then yeah, I know I still have a lot to learn.
Editing this comment a little since its clear from below I didn’t communicate it very well originally.
there is no such thing as “knowing” a kanji. It’s not a very good metric for measuring anything. A common beginner problem is people will read rtk and learn a bunch of keywords/vague meanings for joyo kanji, think they know all of Japanese, then open up a simple book and they can’t read anything. why?
1) kanji often have completely different meanings/readings when used in isolation and in compound words. As I stated below,
>if you knew the words “似合う” and “鍵,“ that would probably not be sufficient for you to guess the meaning of “合鍵.”
If you simply say “I will learn this kanji” and only learn 1 reading and 1 meaning, you’re not doing anything but dunning-krugering yourself into thinking you know more than you already do.
2) Nobody agrees on what it means to “know” a kanji anyway, so it’s a pretty useless definition. Measurement metrics are good when they’re as objective as possible.
**If you were in a language class, and the teacher passed out just a list of 50 kanji and said “learn these by next week because they will be on the test” with no other context, you and the other students would understandably be pretty upset, precisely because everyone has a different interpretation of what that means. Whereas if they said “learn these 100 vocab words which contain these 50 kanji,” that would be much more clear and reasonable.**
3) Set clear goals for yourself when you try to learn stuff. “I will learn 100 words next week” is a good, clear, objectively measurable, and concrete objective. “I will learn 10 kanji next week” is pointless because you won’t find two people in this subreddit who agree as to what that means.
**tl;dr:** don’t study kanji in isolation without vocab words, set clear goals when you try to learn stuff, kanji dont always mean the same thing when they’re on their own or in compound words.
Anyone interested in testing their kanji ability can look at https://jiken.herokuapp.com/ – you might find your knowledge isn’t entirely restricted to the grade list
Going through 5th and 6th grade now. Most of the kanji is related to stuff they would start seeing in history or science books. That not to say we won’t see or use them ever but often when reading a book I find most of my unknow kanji is middle school level.
Yes! Bought a few books lol
I knew my kanji knowledge was terrible, but lists like that are completely irrelevant to me. What decides if your kanji knowledge is good or not is if you’re able to understand what you’re reading, which I fail pretty hard at.
As someone studying for the N2 exam, Kanji/vocab take up most of my time. I’ve gotten A LOT BETTER but when it comes to reading the news I still have a long way to go.
It really makes me realize how even at N2 level you really don’t have a whole lot of knowledge about this language. A long time ago I heard someone say that “you don’t start learning Japanese until after you’ve passed N1” and honestly, the more I study the more I believe it.
What list are you referring to?
I track my kanji knowledge using the Kanji Grid add-on that /u/jarrabayah mentioned. In the beginning I tracked based on JLPT, but after a little while I tracked compared to grade school level because I found it was much better for estimating the difficulty level (in comparison to my knowledge) of various media.
Personally I think tracking by grade is a much better way of actually checking your Japanese knowledge. Tracking by JLPT is fine, but understand that in that case you’re comparing yourself to a test so it’s harder to guess the difficulty level of various literature or shows.
Honestly, unless you’re trying to pass an exam to get into university or work in Japanese, I don’t think that matters too much. As long as you know the kanji relevant to you at your current stage of learning, that’s the most important thing, in my opinion.
There are a lot of 常用 kanji I didn’t know for literal *years* because they never came up in any content I was interested in at the time. A lot of plant and fish kanji fall into this category, for example. I’ve been reading Japanese novels for over a year without major issues when I first came across 朴, which is technically a 常用 kanji, for example.
As you get better the amount of topics you interact with will naturally broaden and you will learn more kanji (and more importantly words!) than you knew before. No need to rush, take the journey one day at a time.
Derp 🙁
Not really. It’s just a list, which means with time and effort, you can memorize it! Start with Anki!
Not really. I already know I don’t know any Kanji. Hell, I only just memorized Hiragana and Katakana.
It does give me some memorization guidelines to study from tho’.