Complete Kanji Quiz

Ceci est un quiz pour le 常用 漢字 ou les kanji les plus courants rencontrés en japonais.

This is a multiple-choice quiz, to test the 常用漢字 【じょうようかんじ】 or general-use (most common) kanji. These kanji correspond to the N1 JLPT exam and are a total of 2,136 in number.

You can quiz not just kanji vs. English, but also English with kana vs. kanji, or kanji with kana vs. English, etc.

The interesting point about this app is that the 常用漢字 were obtained directly from the official publications made by the Japanese Ministry of Education. This list of 2,136 kanji represents the most commonly used kanji in the Japanese language, which are also the only kanji that are allowed to be used in official documents released by the Japanese government.

Moreover, the English translation of the kanji is given merely as a single, most common word for each of the kanji, -- without the numerous, less common meanings. In addition, solely the most common pronunciation is provided for each kanji. The reasoning for this is simple: most kanji have multiple translations, a lot of which are only rarely encountered, and it serves little purpose to memorize a myriad of uncommon translations without first learning those that are actually useful. Similarly, nearly all of the kanji have multiple pronunciations, including several of each くんよみ and おんよみ. For instance, 「生」 alone has 12 different pronunciations. And, needless to say, it is not useful to memorize all of the uncommon pronunciations for each of the 2,136 kanji, without first knowing all of the common kanji in question.

As such, this quiz includes:

• the most common kanji

• the most common pronunciations

• the most common English translation

• the most common examples for each of the specific pronunciations

Another useful feature of this app, is that if you go to the Kanji List page, you can sort the kanji based on how many times you have answered it correctly / incorrectly and then exclude these kanji from the quiz.

UPDATE: Implemented support for the Samsung Galaxy Note series S-pen, based on the publicly available Samsung S-pen SDK (v.1.01). You can now also take photos with your phone and use them as a hint for each kanji.