Kanji Sieve – Analysing Kanji Usage
Friday, February 26th, 2010
This is a little FileMaker solution I’ve written.
It takes a piece of pasted Japanese text and analyses the kanji contained in it.
I wrote it as a quick and probably imprecise way of looking at kanji usage in texts. Probably because of the 1998 study of kanji usage in the Asahi Shinbun (Shinbun denshi media no kanji, Senseido, 1998) usually a figure is quoted of 1000 most frequent kanji account for 95% of usage. I have also seen this as 1000 characters allow you to read 95% of articles (a subtle difference) but I think this is a bit of an overstatement, (the thread below suggests 1900 kanji in order to read 95% of compounds). While doing a bit of research on this I came across several other frequency studies and an interesting thread where Jim Breen notes
…a discussion at a language teaching conference in Japan I attended in 1999, where there was general consensus that
the average Japanese adult could read 700-800 kanji…
Although I find this a bit hard to imagine, write by hand maybe…



