Kanji by Grade Level: What Japanese Kids Learn Each Year

Short answer: Japanese elementary schools teach 1,026 kanji over six years: 80 in grade 1, 160 in grade 2, 200 in grade 3, 202 in grade 4, 193 in grade 5 and 191 in grade 6. These are the kyōiku kanji (教育漢字, “education kanji”). Junior high school then adds most of the remaining jōyō kanji. Grade order is a good, official sequence, but it was designed for Japanese children, not for adults studying for the JLPT.

This article explains where the numbers come from, what each grade looks like, how grade order compares with JLPT order, and when it makes sense for you to follow it.

Where the grade lists come from

The lists are set by Japan’s Ministry of Education (MEXT). The elementary school curriculum guidelines, the Gakushū Shidō Yōryō, include an appendix called the 学年別漢字配当表 (gakunen-betsu kanji haitōhyō), literally “table of kanji allocated by school year”. You can read it in the official MEXT curriculum guidelines (PDF, Japanese).

The current table was published in 2017 and has been in full use since April 2020. That revision raised the total from 1,006 to 1,026 by adding 20 kanji used in prefecture names, such as 茨 (Ibaraki) and 熊 (Kumamoto), and moved some kanji between grades 4, 5 and 6. If you find a list online with 1,006 kanji, it is the older version.

Every kyōiku kanji is also a jōyō kanji, one of the 2,136 characters on the official list of kanji for general use.

How many kanji per grade

Grade	Kanji in that grade	Running total
1	80	80
2	160	240
3	200	440
4	202	642
5	193	835
6	191	1,026

Two things stand out. First, the pace is gentle by adult standards: about 200 new kanji a year, roughly one per school day. Second, the load jumps after grade 1, so grade 2 already doubles the total.

Reading first, writing a year later

The guidelines treat reading and writing differently. In each grade, children are expected to read the kanji assigned up to that grade. For writing, they are expected to use the previous grade’s kanji in sentences and to start writing the current grade’s kanji gradually. In other words, writing trails reading by about a year.

The guidelines also allow schools some flexibility. Kanji can be taught a year earlier or later when it helps, and kanji from later grades can appear in class materials with furigana. This is why children’s books often print furigana over some kanji but not others: the publisher is usually matching the reader’s grade.

If you are an adult learner, the same idea applies to you. Recognition can run ahead of handwriting. See do you need to write kanji by hand for how far to take writing.

What grade 1 looks like

The 80 grade 1 kanji are a picture of a six-year-old’s world. They include:

• Numbers: 一 to 十, plus 百 (hundred), 千 (thousand) and 円 (yen).
• Nature: 山 (mountain), 川 (river), 雨 (rain), 木 (tree), 森 (forest), 石 (stone), 空 (sky), 天 (heaven).
• The body: 口 (mouth), 目 (eye), 耳 (ear), 手 (hand), 足 (foot).
• Animals and small things: 犬 (dog), 虫 (insect), 貝 (shellfish), 糸 (thread), 竹 (bamboo).
• School and people: 学 (study), 校 (school), 先生 (teacher), 字 (character), 男 (man), 女 (woman), 子 (child).
• Position and colour: 上, 下, 中, 左, 右, and 赤, 青, 白.

Most of these are pictographs or very simple compounds, and many reappear as parts of later kanji. 田 (rice field) shows up in 男, 町 and 思; 木 builds 林 and 森, and also 休 (rest), a person leaning on a tree, as the 休 page shows. For a child this is concrete and easy to picture, and for an adult it is also a good set of building blocks.

Grade order vs JLPT order

The JLPT is built for adults learning Japanese as a foreign language, and it has not published an official kanji list since 2010 (see how many kanji are in each JLPT level). The two sequences overlap a lot at the beginning, and then drift apart.

We compared the official grade 1 and grade 2 tables with Kanji Guide’s own JLPT groups:

• All 81 kanji in our N5 group are school kanji from grade 1 or grade 2. So if you know the first two grades, you have every N5 kanji in our list, and more.
• Only 50 of the 80 grade 1 kanji are in our N5 group. The other 30 sit at higher JLPT levels: 18 at N4 (such as 手, 足, 目, 花, 赤), 4 at N3 (such as 王, 耳, 石) and 8 at N2 (貝, 玉, 糸, 森, 林, 村, 竹, 虫).
• 31 N5 kanji are grade 2 kanji, including everyday words an adult needs early: 書 (write), 食 (eat), 読 (read), 話 (talk), 時 (time), 国 (country) and 語 (language).

This shows the difference in design. Grade 1 teaches shellfish, thread and bamboo because they are simple shapes that children can draw and recognise. The JLPT puts eat, read and time first because adults need them to read a menu or a train timetable. Neither order is wrong; they serve different readers.

Who should learn kanji by grade

Grade order is a good fit if you:

• Read children’s books, manga for younger readers or graded readers. Many books for children state the target grade, and their furigana is often matched to the school table.
• Are a parent helping a child at a Japanese school or a weekend Japanese school (hoshūkō), or a heritage learner following a Japanese textbook.
• Plan to take the Kanji Kentei (漢検). Its lower levels follow the school grades closely.
• Want a fixed, official list that will not change from one website to the next.

JLPT order is usually better if you:

• Have a JLPT date. The test checks kanji inside vocabulary at each level, so follow the level you are sitting. Start with the JLPT N5 kanji list or the N5 page.
• Need practical Japanese quickly, for work, travel or living in Japan.

You can also mix them. Learn grades 1 and 2 (240 kanji), which covers all of N5, then switch to JLPT levels for N4 and above. Or follow JLPT order and use the grade tables only to judge how “basic” a kanji is to a Japanese reader.

How to study kanji by grade as an adult

Children spend six years on 1,026 kanji. As an adult you can move faster, because you can use mnemonics, spaced repetition and the vocabulary you already know. A simple plan:

1. Start with grade 1 as one block. 80 kanji at 5 a day takes a little over two weeks. Learn each with a short story or picture and one common word.
2. Do grade 2 next. It is where most everyday verbs appear (行く, 来る, 書く, 読む, 話す). At 5 to 10 a day it takes three to five weeks.
3. Learn words, not lone characters. For example, 先生 (teacher) and 学校 (school) teach four kanji at once. Our guide to which kanji readings to learn first explains how to pick them.
4. Keep writing behind reading, as schools do. Recognise first; handwrite later if you need it.
5. Read at the level you have reached. Children’s books for a given grade are good practice, because the furigana covers exactly what you have not learned yet. Our first 1,000 kanji plan shows how to pace the full set.

One note on shapes: textbooks use a special textbook typeface (教科書体), which is closer to handwriting than most screen fonts. If a kanji in a children’s book looks slightly different from the one on your screen, see why kanji look different printed and handwritten.

After grade 6

Elementary school is not the end. The junior high school guidelines add about 300 to 400 more jōyō kanji to read in the first year, 350 to 450 in the second, and “most” of the remaining jōyō kanji by the third year, while children keep practising writing the 1,026 school kanji. Unlike elementary school, junior high has no official kanji list for each year, so the exact order depends on the textbook.

For adult learners, the practical takeaway is that the 1,026 school kanji are the core of everyday written Japanese, and the rest of the 2,136 jōyō kanji build on them.

Study grade 1 and 2 kanji with pictures

For a ranking by real usage instead of school year, see the most common kanji. Every kanji on this site has a picture story, readings, example words and stroke order, from 一 and 人 to grade 6. To review them with spaced repetition, open the study app in your browser, or get the Kanji Guide iPhone app on the App Store.