I’m using an app called Kanji Study to help me learn kanji. One of the cool things it lets you do is sort the kanji using a list of sequences! The main sequence I use is called JLPT levels, containing 80 kanji characters, which the app describes like this: “Kanji are divided by levels used in Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Please note that there are no official lists.” Pretty straightforward, right? Well there’s another list containing 103 kanji called “JLPT levels (revised)”. I found this pretty confusing because if I’ve been told correctly, there was a change to the JLPT but it changed the number of levels from 4 levels to 5. The description is a lot less helpful for me. “Commonly found revision of the above JLPT levels”. I googled it and found a few sources saying there were 100 kanji with some sources saying 80. Did they add 23 kanji within the last couple years or are there multiple ways of categorizing kanji? I’m really new to learning kanji and any form of help would really be appreciated!
1 comment
Most sources recommend knowing at least 100 kanji, but the JLPT no longer publishes which kanji those are. All existing lists are guesses based on what the official list used to be + what people have seen crop up on the practice tests over the years.
When in doubt, study the longer list. I’ve seen people recommend learning 200-300 kanji just to be safe, which might be overkill, but whatever extra you can squeeze in will probably work to your advantage. The test will also sometimes try to fool you with “fake” kanji that don’t have quite the right strokes, so looking individually at the kanji and their radicals (and not just the general words as a whole) is helpful.