As a friend is currently in the process of preparing for her Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) and as such studying the list of 1,945 joyo kanji, I remembered a resource that I used a long time ago when learning the characters. I just found it again on the net so am posting it here in the hope it might help someone else again.

During my studies, I stumbled on this resource, which is a frequency analysis of kanji as used in Japanese newspapers. The resulting graph is interestingly enough a pretty steep long tail: the conclusion is that 1,000 characters provide 95% coverage of characters used in newspapers. Obviously, Japanese is about learning character compounds and not single characters, but if you have to learn the characters anyway this list might provide you with a good guideline on which characters to start with and in which order to learn them.

=> List of 1000 most common characters

Installed Movable Type today to maintain my site in and will also migrate the private blog to MT one of these days. Anyone who can make me a nicer banner then the one above here? (For those who don't know: it is the Den Helder lighthouse).

For old times sake I have put my thesis on the Sasebo Dialect back online. Feel free to browse through it if you're interested.

=> Het Dialect van Sasebo: een beschrijvende grammatica (PDF)