Quote:
Originally Posted by Hatredcopter
Where'd ya get that number from? Even for Chinese, that's far-fetched. There are indeed tens of thousands of Kanji in Japanese, but the vast majority of them are archaic or obscure and never used in regular speech or writing. As Nyororin mentioned, the number of Kanji needed for literacy is about 2000. This is what the JLPT Level 1 tests for. These Kanji are defined by the Japanese Ministry of Education, and it's what all schoolchildren in Japan learn all the way from first grade to the end of high school.
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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 contain 80,000 or more characters, many consisting of obscure variants. Most of these are not in common use in either Japan or China. So 130,000 Charecters..
I'm sorry, I was off by 20,000. My bad
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