Approximately 2,000 to 3,000 characters are in common use in Japan, a few thousand more find occasional use, and a total of about 13,000 characters can be encoded in various Japanese Industrial Standards for kanji.
Japanese school children are expected to learn 1,006 basic kanji characters, the kyÅiku kanji, before finishing the sixth grade. The order in which these characters are learned is fixed. The kyÅiku kanji list is a subset of a larger list, originally of 1,945 kanji characters, in 2010 extended to 2,136, known as the jÅyÅ kanji – characters required for the level of fluency necessary to read newspapers and literature in Japanese. This larger list of characters is to be mastered by the end of the ninth grade.