Joyo Grade 1 kanji

Grade 1 of the Joyo kanji list is the starter set Japanese children learn in their first year of elementary school. These are the kanji on every classroom poster: numbers, basic body parts, common verbs, the kanji for "school" and "child" and "person".

There is nothing accidental about which kanji are in Grade 1. The Ministry picks characters that appear in the children's immediate vocabulary, have visually simple forms, and reuse strokes that build up to more complex kanji later. Numbers one through ten, basic days and months, family relationship 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. Beyond practical reading, Grade 1 is also where children first learn the rules of stroke order, radical decomposition, and reading variation - so the characters are chosen partly for their teaching value, not just their frequency. Many of the kanji in this set are radicals or components that appear in dozens of higher-grade kanji, so investing time in Grade 1 pays off across the entire syllabus.

WaniKani coverage

WaniKani teaches every Grade 1 kanji, with the bulk reached 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