Joyo Secondary (Grade 9) kanji

1,130 kanji - the full Secondary (Grade 9) set from the Ministry of Education's Joyo list.

After elementary school, the Ministry of Education stops assigning kanji to specific years. Every Joyo character outside the kyoiku (Grades 1-6) syllabus is introduced somewhere across junior high and senior high, and "Grade 9" is the bucket that collects all of them.

Only the elementary grades come with a year-by-year kanji allocation. The remaining 1,130 Joyo characters are taught across the six years of junior and senior high without per-year pinning - schools, textbooks, and study tools each pick their own ordering. The wkstats convention - followed here - is to group all of these as "Grade 9", a label borrowed from kanji study tools that needed a single bucket. These characters cover the specialist vocabulary that a literate Japanese adult is expected to recognise but does not learn at primary school: medical and legal terms, the rarer literary and historical kanji, names of plants and animals, abstract emotional language, and a long tail of characters that appear in fewer than one in a thousand sentences but still show up in newspapers, business documents, and adult fiction. This is the biggest single bucket on the list and the one where coverage gaps in study tools - including WaniKani - actually appear.

WaniKani coverage

WaniKani teaches a substantial chunk of the secondary set by around level 50 and effectively the complete set by level 60. Some specialist characters remain absent, but the practical coverage is wide enough for most native-aimed reading.

To see exactly which of the 1,130 Secondary (Grade 9) 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 1,130 Secondary (Grade 9) kanji

See your personal coverage

The grid above is the same for every visitor. To see how many of the 1,130 Secondary (Grade 9) 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.

Open the Joyo coverage tool →

Other Joyo grades

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