The

jōyō kanji The is the guide to kanji characters and their readings, announced officially by the Japanese Ministry of Education. Current ''jōyō kanji'' are those on a list of 2,136 characters issued in 2010. It is a slightly modified version of the ''tō ...

system of representing written

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

currently consists of 2,136 characters.

List of characters

* For brevity, only one English translation is given per

kanji are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese family of scripts, Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese language, Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese ...

. * The "Grade" column specifies the grade in which the kanji is taught in

Elementary schools in Japan in Japan is compulsory. All children begin first grade in the April after they turn six--kindergarten is growing increasingly popular, but is not mandatory—and starting school is considered a very important event in a child's life. History ...

. Grade "S" means that it is taught in

secondary school A secondary school describes an institution that provides secondary education and also usually includes the building where this takes place. Some secondary schools provide both '' secondary education, lower secondary education'' (ages 11 to 14) ...

. * The list is sorted by Japanese reading (

on'yomi are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequ ...

katakana is a Japanese syllabary, one component of the Japanese writing system along with hiragana, kanji and in some cases the Latin script (known as rōmaji). The word ''katakana'' means "fragmentary kana", as the katakana characters are derived fr ...

, then

kun'yomi are the logographic Chinese characters taken from the Chinese script and used in the writing of Japanese. They were made a major part of the Japanese writing system during the time of Old Japanese and are still used, along with the subsequen ...

hiragana is a Japanese syllabary, part of the Japanese writing system, along with ''katakana'' as well as ''kanji''. It is a phonetic lettering system. The word ''hiragana'' literally means "flowing" or "simple" kana ("simple" originally as contrast ...

), in accordance with the ordering in the official Jōyō table. * This list does not include characters that were present in older versions of the list but have since been removed ( 勺, 銑, 脹, 錘, 匁). * Hyphens in the kun'yomi readings separate kanji from their

okurigana are kana suffixes following kanji stems in Japanese written words. They serve two purposes: to inflect adjectives and verbs, and to force a particular kanji to have a specific meaning and be read a certain way. For example, the plain verb fo ...

. *The "New" column attempts to reflect the official glyph shapes as closely as possible. This requires using the characters 𠮟, 塡, 剝, 頰 which are outside of Japan's basic character set,

JIS X 0208 JIS X 0208 is a 2-byte character set specified as a Japanese Industrial Standards, Japanese Industrial Standard, containing 6879 graphic characters suitable for writing text, place names, personal names, and so forth in the Japanese language. Th ...

(one of them is also outside the Unicode BMP). In practice, these characters are usually replaced by the characters 叱, 填, 剥, 頬, which are present in JIS X 0208. * The "Old" column reflects the official

kyūjitai ''Kyūjitai'' ( ja, 舊字體 / 旧字体, lit=old character forms) are the traditional forms of kanji, Chinese written characters used in Japanese. Their simplified counterparts are ''shinjitai'' ( ja, 新字体, lit=new character forms, lab ...

specified in the standard jōyō table; it does not include unofficial, extended, or

Asahi characters are forms of Kanji particular to the ''Asahi Shimbun'' newspaper. Unlike Simplified Chinese, where simplifications apply to all characters, the general custom in Japanese publications is to print Jōyō/Jinmeiyō Kanji in simplified Shinjitai fo ...

. * The readings presented here are those noted in the official Jōyō table. Special readings and uncommon readings are indicated in brackets.Se

page 2, bullet point 7: "Readings indented one character to the right are special readings, or readings with very narrow use. Indented reading for which a prefecture name is indicated in the 'Remarks' column are, as a general rule, only ever used in the specified prefecture name." Other readings (generally less common, such as the

nanori are the often non-standard kanji character readings (pronunciations) found almost exclusively in Japanese names. In the Japanese language, many Japanese names are constructed from common characters with standard pronunciations. However, names ...

) may also exist.

Notes

External links

Kanji Mnemonics by Henshall

Kanji and translation from table as flashcards
{{DEFAULTSORT:Joyo Kanji Linguistics lists Japanese writing system

List of characters

See also

Notes

External links