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.

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.

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 dominate. Use the ranking to build a study order, learning the highest-frequency kanji first for the greatest reading payoff.