When Japanese inspect my studies, they invariably come across a few kanji they don't know, both reading and meaning. Out of curiousity, I'm trying to compile a list of the most common. I haven't had anyone sit down and read through all 2042, but these are regulars. Do you have others to add?

匁 monme
銑 pig iron
崇 adore
諮 consult with

While it is a commonly held belief that the jyouyo kanji list contains the most commonly used characters, there isn't a whole lot of evidence for this. The list was based off of the toyo kanji list constructed in 1946 by a group of scholars who included kanji they believed to be commonly used.

So, between the amount of time that has passed between the initial construction of the list and the inaccurate methods used to create the list, it is only natural that there would be at least a few characters that are rare that have been accidently included.

It would be interesting to see a real scientific analysis of Japanese literature, newspapers, magazines, and manga with regards to kanji frequency. There have been a decent number of word frequency studies, but I haven't been able to find any kanji frequency studies freely available online.

Most of the ones I've found use only newspapers. That's pretty useful and interesting data, but it's obviously skewed toward newspapers. I have the feeling that manga would actually be a more accurate source material.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyo_kanji

Heisig discusses at length the selection process of kanji for several standards in the introduction to RTK3. It's a rather fascinating topic, especially as it relates to computer selection standards since Japanese increasingly use text input as their only Japanese use besides filling in forms and making notes.

Seeing which of the jouyo kanji Japanese don't recognize is an insight into the government's selection since it's obviously not based on frequency. Kanji like 丼 domburi, which every Japanese surely knows by grade school because of its frequency in food, are not included. But 匁 monme is. 匁 may have historical importance, but is of zero signifigance to modern use.

I asked on another message board a while ago why characters like 匁 and not more common ones were included in the joyo-kanji. The answer that I got was that those characters (particularly the ones that are units of measurement) were still in common use when the joyo-kanji were fixed, and the metric system has now taken over. But 尺 is still used quite a bit.

I just looked at the Wikipedia article for 匁 and found a few fun facts about it:
-was officially named 匁 during the Meiji period. Until then it was called せん(銭)
-The 5 yen coin weighs one 匁
-When the ones digit of a quantity of 匁 is zero, you can use 目(pronounced め here) instead of 匁 so 30匁 and 300匁 can be written as 三十目 and 三百目.
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8C%81

dingomick Wrote:崇 adore

While the rest were reasonable, I must express my doubt over this kanji. The word 崇拝 is hardly rare! Somehow I think that if you were to mention the word 崇拝 to them, they'd go "oh right, duh!".

Off topic a little, but can someone type the thread+religion kanji? Thanks!

leosmith Wrote:Off topic a little, but can someone type the thread+religion kanji? Thanks!

綜? I suggest getting a kanji dictionary, it is handy for such things. There's also Wiktionary, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical.

On Windows, JWPce is great for finding kanji when you don't know their readings, and if you just want the character for something you could also use the MS IME pad (handwriting):

Thanks!

JimmySeal Wrote:On Windows, JWPce is great for finding kanji when you don't know their readings, and if you just want the character for something you could also use the MS IME pad (handwriting):
(image)

Does anyone know of any similar applications for OSX?

hknamida Wrote:Does anyone know of any similar applications for OSX?

JEDict has a similar handwriting recognition feature, although, at least from the screenshot, it doesn't look as elegant as the IME writing pad.

www.jedict.com

Strangely I met two Japanese people (and also some Chinese people) who didn't know 嬌.