Joyo Grade 1 kanji
80 kanji - the full Grade 1 set from the Ministry of Education's Joyo list.
Japanese children learn these 80 kanji in their first year of elementary school. They are the characters on every classroom poster - numbers, basic body parts, common verbs, and the kanji for "school", "child", and "person".
There is nothing accidental about which kanji are in Grade 1. The Ministry picks characters from the children's immediate vocabulary and keeps the forms visually simple; the strokes practised here build up to more complex kanji later. Numbers one through ten, basic days and months, family terms - mother, father, big brother, big sister - the four cardinal directions, and the words for sun, moon, mountain, river, fire, and water are all here. Grade 1 is also where children first learn the rules of stroke order and radical decomposition, and where reading variation first appears, so the characters are chosen as much for teaching value as for frequency. Many of them double as radicals or components in dozens of higher-grade kanji, which is why time spent on Grade 1 pays off across the entire syllabus.
WaniKani coverage
Every Grade 1 kanji is on WaniKani, and the bulk sits at Guru I or higher by around level 8. The handful that come later are usually components of more advanced kanji rather than standalone first-year vocabulary.
To see exactly which of the 80 Grade 1 kanji you have already learned, head to the Joyo coverage tool - it ties your live WaniKani SRS progress to the lists on this site and breaks down coverage by grade.
All 80 Grade 1 kanji
See your personal coverage
The grid above is the same for every visitor. To see how many of the 80 Grade 1 kanji you have personally learned, open the Joyo coverage tool and paste a WaniKani personal access token. Your token stays in your browser; nothing is stored on a server.