Core Kanji: A Catalogue of 2,088 Kanji (Learn to Read in Japanese)

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 the 2,088 “core kanji” that are most frequently used by Japanese people. This kanji catalogue is designed to be an efficient tool for the memorization and retrieval of those characters. It features memorable descriptions of the kanji, retrieval cues to help you to remember their pronunciations (or “readings”), and comparisons among similar kanji characters. It also includes a Pronunciation Index listing the 4,200 pronunciations that are associated with the kanji in the book, making it simple to look up a character if you know at least one of its pronunciations. You can also look up the kanji in this book if you know their reference numbers, which are often provided in our four Japanese Readers (see below).

As you develop a basic acquaintance with the core kanji characters, you can turn your attention to reading practice, which will naturally strengthen your knowledge of the kanji. With this in mind, we have created four volumes titled “Learn to Read in Japanese, A Japanese Reader,” in which we provide more than 8,300 Japanese sentences for you to read. These sentences are keyed to your knowledge of the kanji, in the sense that they contain only kanji that you know or are in the process of learning. This book is a companion to those four Readers.

As a bonus, this book includes the files that you will need to use Kanji ID, our innovative technique for identifying kanji that you encounter in your reading. These files include a kanji catalogue listing 2,088 kanji, instructions for using Kanji ID, a Kanji Table to use for practice as you learn the new technique, a Kanji Group Index listing kanji groups, and a Kanji Trait Index in which you can look up characteristic traits that you perceive in unknown kanji, allowing you to locate the kanji groups to which they belong and thus to identify them quickly.

We feel confident that, if you master the set of core kanji described in this book, and if you practice reading the Japanese reading material that we provide in our Readers, you will be able to achieve basic Japanese reading proficiency.