How many Kanji symbols does the average Japanese person know?
Japanese school children are expected to learn 1,006 basic kanji characters, the kyōiku kanji, before finishing the sixth grade. The order in which these characters are learned is fixed. The kyōiku kanji list is a subset of a larger list of 1,945 kanji characters known as the jōyō kanji, characters required for the level of fluency necessary to read newspapers and literature in Japanese. This larger list of characters is to be mastered by the end of the ninth grade. The number of possible characters is disputed. The Daikanwa Jiten contains about 50,000 characters, and this was thought to be comprehensive, but more recent mainland Chinese dictionaries, such as the Yiti Zidian dictionary published in 2004 contain 100,000 or more characters many consisting of obscure variants. The vast majority of these are not in common use in either Japan or China. Approximately 2,000 to 3,000 characters are in common use in Japan I have witnessed many times where a gaijin friend of mine corrected a Jap
