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The "Grade" column specifies the grade in which the kanji is taught in Elementary schools in Japan. Grade "S" means that it is taught in secondary school . The list is sorted by Japanese reading ( on'yomi in katakana , then kun'yomi in hiragana ), in accordance with the ordering in the official Jōyō table.
On-yomi readings of the kanji are denoted by small caps and kun-yomi by italics. Okurigana are separated by parentheses. The New Nelson contains about 7,000 entries, many of which are actually variant characters. Every character has index numbers into the Morohashi dictionary and the Japanese JIS X 0208 standard if they exist.
Due to the requirement that official government documents make use of only jōyō kanji and their readings, several rare characters are also included due to their use in the Constitution of Japan, which was being written at the same time the original 1,850-character tōyō kanji list was compiled. The 2,136 kanji in the jōyō kanji consist of:
There also exist kanji created by the Japanese and given an on'yomi reading despite not being a Chinese-derived or a Chinese-originating character. Some kanji were introduced from different parts of China at different times, and so have multiple on'yomi , and often multiple meanings.
The modern Japanese writing system uses a combination of logographic kanji, which are adopted Chinese characters, and syllabic kana.Kana itself consists of a pair of syllabaries: hiragana, used primarily for native or naturalized Japanese words and grammatical elements; and katakana, used primarily for foreign words and names, loanwords, onomatopoeia, scientific names, and sometimes for emphasis.
Jōyō kanji has about nine kokuji; there is some dispute over classification, but the following are generally included: 働 どう dō , はたら(く) hatara(ku) "work", the most commonly used kokuji, used in the fundamental verb hatara(ku) ( 働く , "work") , included in elementary texts and on the Proficiency Test N5.
The use of kanji has been criticised for various reasons, the main criticisms being: There are too many kanji, and it is difficult to remember how to read and write them. The Latin alphabet is used internationally, and using kanji separates Japan from the rest of the world.
As with on'yomi, there can be multiple kun'yomi for the same kanji, and some kanji have no kun'yomi at all. For instance, the character for east, 東, has tō as its on'yomi, from Middle Chinese tung. However, Japanese already had two words for "east": higashi and azuma. Thus the kanji 東 had the latter readings added as kun'yomi.