hi! i’m a new japanese learner, i use duolingo for now since i prefer to learn the alphabet first, and i was researching on kanji and i saw that it has 50k characters, and i was wondering how many of those do i need to learn? i know i don’t need to learn kanji this early on but it would be nice to know
i am only using duolingo for the alphabet!
if you are more advanced in japanese and can answer this for me it would be great, thank you😭🩷
7 comments
you technically only need around 2200 to be able to read most things but in practice you probably want to know more than that
You need to learn the Jouyou kanji, which are the 2,136 kanji for normal use. This will allow you to read books, newspapers, subtitles etc. Everything outside of this list is typically stuff that’s specialised for a particular area. Unless you’re working as a doctor in Japan, you don’t need to know medical terms, for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji?wprov=sfla1
Don’t use duolingo, i recommend you watching few videos by “That Japanese Man Yuta” on youtube – you will at least understand what to prepare for.
As others have said, you need around 2000 to read a newspaper.
I would definitely recommend getting into kanji sooner rather than later (after hiragana and katakana, of course).
My professor in uni didn’t push kanji, and then after four years of classes I moved to Japan and realized I was functionally illiterate. You can’t read most things without kanji.
As others said, it’s about 2000, but you’ll be fairly literate after learning the most common 500 or so. It’s less about how many characters you can identify on a flash card and more about how many words (usually combinations of characters) you can read and understand. Most of the characters are useless on their own, so just learn words and the kanji will stick.
50 fucking k? How the hell am I supposed to learn.
if you’re just starting, very few. learn letters as they’re used in words you learn, don’t go overboard. you cannot front-load memorizing all the characters first, or at least you really don’t want to. you’ll forget them all before you start using them, it’s a waste of time
also consider using something other than just duolingo. it’s okay for repetition of stuff you already learned, but it’s bad for teaching new grammar. it’s particularly horrible about putting things in a sane and comprehensible order. try genki 1 or tae kim’s online guide as your grammar basis