Gera Tools

Japanese Kanji Frequency Counter

Count how often each unique kanji appears in a pasted Japanese text

Extracts every unique kanji from pasted Japanese text and ranks them by frequency, ignoring hiragana, katakana, and punctuation, with the Unicode code point shown for each. Runs entirely in your browser. It runs free in your browser on Gera Tools, with nothing uploaded.

Last updated Source: Gera Tools

Which characters count as kanji?

The tool keeps only characters in the CJK Unified Ideographs blocks (U+4E00 to U+9FFF) plus Extension A (U+3400 to U+4DBF) and compatibility ideographs. Hiragana, katakana, Latin letters, digits, and punctuation are excluded so only true kanji are counted.

A small set of kanji accounts for most of the characters in any Japanese text, so knowing which kanji appear and how often is the fastest way to prioritise study or profile a document. This tool pulls out every unique kanji, ignores the kana and punctuation around them, and ranks them by frequency.

How it works

The tool walks the text character by character and keeps only those whose Unicode code point falls in a kanji block:

U+3400 – U+4DBF   CJK Extension A
U+4E00 – U+9FFF   CJK Unified Ideographs (the common kanji)
U+F900 – U+FAFF   CJK Compatibility Ideographs

Everything else — hiragana, katakana, Latin, digits, and punctuation — is skipped. Surviving characters are tallied in a map, then sorted by count, with each kanji’s code point shown in U+XXXX form.

Why frequency matters for Japanese study

Japanese texts follow a steep frequency curve: a relatively small number of kanji account for the vast majority of characters in any given article or book. The Joyo kanji set — roughly 2,136 characters approved for general use — covers almost everything in newspapers and everyday prose. But within that set, a much smaller core appears again and again. Analysing real material you want to read tells you which characters will pay off fastest.

The ranking output is most useful in two ways:

  • Targeted study — If you want to read a specific manga, novel, or set of articles, paste in a sample and you immediately know which kanji to prioritise. This beats memorising a generic frequency list that may not match the vocabulary domain you care about.
  • Document profiling — Comparing the kanji profiles of two texts — say a news article versus a literary novel — reveals how differently the vocabulary skews. Literary texts often surface rarer kanji that general frequency lists underweight.

Example and tips

In the sentence 日本語の勉強は楽しいです the kana drop away and you are left with the kanji 日 本 語 勉 強 楽, each appearing once. Feed the tool a longer article and the curve steepens: a handful of kanji such as 人 国 年 日 will typically dominate across most general-interest Japanese text.

The Unicode code point shown alongside each kanji — for example U+65E5 for 日 — is useful if you want to look the character up in a dictionary programmatically, paste it into a Unicode chart, or distinguish visually similar glyphs (there are several kanji that look nearly identical at small sizes). The percentage column shows the character’s share of all kanji in the text, making it easy to see which characters carry disproportionate weight.

Feed in a few paragraphs rather than a single sentence for the most useful ranking — with a handful of kanji the ranking is flat and less informative. Everything runs locally in your browser without uploading your text.