I see grades for kanji 1-6, but then it skips to 8. What happened to grade 7?

See where? I don't know of anything on the site that's divided up by the Japanese school order, since RtK doesn't follow that.

If you're looking at another site, it may use "8" to represent the secondary school kanji -- about half of the jōyō kanji are covered in grades 7-9 of the Japanese school system, but they are not divided into individual years like the elementary school kanji.

I was talking about in general, not this site, not just any site, but books and all. Whenever I see grades for kanji, it skips over grade 7. Also, I have never seen grade 9 being used to label kanji. Can you give me an example?

jadarite Wrote:I was talking about in general, not this site, not just any site, but books and all. Whenever I see grades for kanji, it skips over grade 7. Also, I have never seen grade 9 being used to label kanji. Can you give me an example?

What you are asking is pretty un-clear (well, to me at least anyway).

What do you mean by "grade 7"?

The kanji kentei grades go from 10 (the lowest) up to 1. There are plenty books you can get hold of. Have a look here.

The first grade of Junior high school corresponds pretty closely to the kanji kentei grade 4.

My understanding is that in elementarty school, kids are taught a specific set of kanji at each year level. Once they get to Junior high however, while they are "taught" up to 1945 characters by the end of Junior high school, they don't study kanji in as restricted a way as in elementary school.

If you look up a kanji, in say JWPce, it'll give the grade number for joyo kanji. 1-6 is easy, but I don't think there's any kanji labeled with grade 7. There are a toooon of kanji labeled grades 8 and 9. I wonder how junior high students go about learning all those kanji...

I think the grades go 1-6, then "Junior High", followed by "Name Kanji".
Since the last group is taught in the 9th grade (actually JHS 3rd grade) and there is no number "junior high" my guess is that people just skipped 7 as part of the abstraction process. Just a guess though.

Also I suggest Wakan to JWpce

As per the Kanjidic documentation:

# G<num> -- the Jouyou grade level. At most one per line. G1 through G6 indicate Jouyou grades 1-6. G8 indicates general-use characters. G9 indicates Jinmeiyou ("for use in names") characters. If not present, it is a kanji outside these categories.

So 8/9 don't correspond to school grades and as dilandau23 suggested 7 was simply skipped when creating it.

The "教育漢字", also part of the "漢検" and "常用漢字", lists 漢字 through grades 1-6. There is a total of 1006 漢字 taught in this way:

1)80漢字
2)160漢字
3)200漢字
4)200漢字
5)185漢字
6)181漢字

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

I hoped that helped.

dilandau23 Wrote:Also I suggest Wakan to JWpce

Last I checked Wakan uses a very outdated edic file (~7mB compared to the current ~10mB), with no way of updating it. JWpce allows you to easily update it on your own.

Another way to look at it is that grade 7 was skipped so that there would be easy indications of what was joyo (1-6) and what was general (8). G8 is good to know, but not 'required' by the BoE.

If they left 7 in there, it would be slightly more confusing because of the continuity. (Not to me, but to some people maybe.)

Joyo includes "grade 8" kanji.