This is the frequency-of-use ranking, expressing the relative frequency of occurrence
of a kanji character in modern Japanese. All kanji in KanjiLearn are ranked, from 1 to
2135. The 25 most frequent Japanese kanji are, in this order: 
(sun), 
(one), 
(ten), 
(two), 
(big), 
(three), 
(person), 
(to meet), 
(country), 
(year), 
(middle), 
(origin), 
(five), 
(four), 
(to leave), 
(up), 
(time), 
(same), 
(long), 
(east), 
(to go), 
(thing), 
(school), 
(life) and 
(moon).
The frequency of a kanji is useful because it gives you an idea on how important the kanji is, relatively to what you have already learned. For example, a kanji of frequency 1500 will be of low importance for a student who has only learned 100 kanji. On the other hand, a kanji of frequency 500 will be of high importance for a student who has studied 1000 kanji already.
However, you should be careful when interpreting the kanji frequency, because these
numbers come from statistics done mostly on written materials such as newspapers and may
not necessarily reflect the true importance of a kanji character in your own situation.
For example the kanji 
which means a
political party, has a frequency of 90 (i.e in the 5% most important kanji) because
it is used very often in newspapers articles related to politics. However, a student of
Japanese who knows less than 1000 kanji is unlikely going to read the newspaper's
political section. On the other hand, the kanji 
which means a dog, has a frequency of 1262, although it is
encountered very often in Japanese textbooks and other learning materials.
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Upon clicking (left or default mouse button) on the frequency
of a kanji card, a context sensitive popup menu displays as show on the right. This popup
menu lists all kanji cards which frequency is in the [-5, +5] range of the current kanji
card frequency, including kanji frequency, kanji character, kanji grade and kanji meaning.
Selecting one of these listed kanji cards will switch KanjiLearn to that kanji card (and
dismiss the popup menu). The Goto card frequency... prompts you to enter a card frequency to switch KanjiLearn to a specific kanji card. Note that this context sensitive popup menu is persistent and will close only when clicking on the Close menu item. |
The kanji character frequency data directly comes from KANJIDIC, which is itself based on statistics published by The National Language Research Institute (Tokyo), interpreted and adapted by Jack Halpern in a manner to make it useful for the learner. The data is derived from the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary (Kenkyusha, Tokyo 1990; NTC, Chicago 1993). The commercial utilization of the frequency numbers is prohibited without written permission from Jack Halpern. See the KanjiLearn Copyrights for details.
This page 
was last updated by JP on 11/30/98.