Core Kanji: A Catalogue of 2,088 Essential Kanji

If you want to learn to read in Japanese, it's best to make an effort early on to become at least somewhat familiar with all of the kanji that are most frequently used by Japanese people, which we call the "core kanji." Once you have developed a basic acquaintance with those characters, you can turn your attention to reading practice, which will naturally strengthen your knowledge of the kanji. Our goal is to help students to achieve basic Japanese reading fluency as efficiently as possible, and to that end we have produced four other volumes titled Learn to Read in Japanese, A Japanese Reader, in which we attempt to demystify and systematize the kanji-learning process and where we provide a large number of memory aids, as described below.

This book is a companion to those four Japanese Readers, and it functions as an efficient tool for the memorization and retrieval of 2,088 core kanji. It lists the characters that we believe you need to know, together with the basic information required to get started reading. For each kanji, this information consists of:

1) The pronunciations that you are likely to encounter for each character.

2) The meanings of the character.

3) One or more sample Japanese words for each of the character's possible pronunciations.

4) A memorable description of the character, to help you to recognize it more easily in the future. Such descriptions often focus on differences between the current kanji and other similar ones.

5) A brief sentence that contains retrieval cues (or mnemonics) for each of the character's possible pronunciations.

6) Comparisons between the character and other similar kanji.

Of course, long before you have become acquainted with all of the core kanji, you should begin to read Japanese text that is keyed to your level of knowledge. In other words, you should practice reading Japanese sentences that are accompanied by readily accessible romaji (or alternatively, hiragana/katakana) equivalents plus English translations and which include only kanji that you have already learned or are learning. In our four Readers, we provide a large number of such sentences at every point in the curriculum: 4,200 sentences in Volume 1, 1,660 in Volume 2, 912 in Volume 3 and 1,620 in Volume 4. In addition, the four books contain 6,500 vocabulary terms that are formatted for reading practice, together with mnemonics to aid in their memorization.

In Volumes 2 and 3 of our series, we also refer students to two online reading practice resources, where they can find more than 3,000 additional practice sentences that are appropriate to their skill levels. After they have read all of this content a few times, they will be ready to move beyond such level-specific text and start reading unselected Japanese material, including newspaper articles.

We wish you great success in your kanji study.