How many kanji are there?

Numbers of characters and reading level
Source	Number	Level
Learnt at Shōgakkō (小学校)	1,026	Schoolchild
Jōyō Kanji (常用漢字)	2,136	Good reader
JIS level one kanji Kanken level pre-one	3,000	Excellent reader
JIS level one and two kanji Kanken level one	6,000	Kanji expert
Dai Kan-Wa Jiten	50,000	Specialist

According to the authoritative Dai Kan-Wa Jiten, about 50,000 Chinese characters in total have been created. However, most of them are obscure. For instance many refer to specific places, or names of insects or plants. Most are not widely used even in China.

The Japanese government's list of recommended characters, the Jōyō Kanji (常用漢字) (see What are the Jōyō Kanji?), consists of 2136 characters,^[1] together with their approved readings, plus another set of called the Jinmeiyō kanji (人名用) literally means 'people name use') which are extra characters permitted to be used in making given names. See What are the Jinmeiyō Kanji? To read a newspaper in Japan, one probably needs to know most of the characters in this set.

Modern written Japanese also often uses characters outside this set, making the set of commonly used kanji larger. Specialized fields such as medicine use many non-Jōyō characters, and many place and family names also use characters outside the Jōyō set. See Names for more on Japanese naming.

Japanese children learn about one thousand kanji from ages six to twelve, followed by further kanji at middle and high school level. See How is Japanese writing taught to Japanese children?

The computer encoding known commonly as the JIS encoding contains two levels, with each level containing about three thousand characters. JIS level one contains all the jōyō and jinmeiyou kanji, as well as a thousand or so more characters. Level two contains about three thousand more characters. See What are JIS level one and two kanji? The highest level examination of the Kanji Kentei or Kanken, the ikkyū (一級) (see Kanji Kentei) tests knowledge of most of the characters in level one and level two. The second highest level examination, the jun'ikkyū (準一級), tests complete knowledge of level one only. A person with a complete knowledge of JIS level one kanji can be said to have a comprehensive knowledge of kanji as used in modern Japanese, and a person with a complete knowledge of both level one and level two kanji has an exceptional level of expertise.

References

常用漢字表 (30 November 2010), Agency for Cultural Affairs

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