Paper short abstract:

Outside of Japan, the chance to see Japanese Kanji occurs more often on Internet websites than on paper. This study examines the frequency of 3,000 kanji's on a Japanese website using the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics Web Japanese Corpus.

Paper long abstract:

Outside of Japan, the chance to see Japanese Kanji occurs more often on Internet websites than the paper. But little is known as to which kanji are used most frequently. How does the frequency of kanji between the paper medium and the website differ? In this study the frequency of 3,000 kanji's on a Japanese website are surveyed. NINJAL Web Japanese Corpus: NWJC is used for this research. This was developed by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) in 2017.

A previous study using the Google search engine to examine kanji on Internet websites found two problems (Tokuhiro, 2013). First, there is an upper limit (25,270,000,000) in the number of items searched. Second, the frequency　of the kanji "情報" is greater than "情". This second issue suggests that Google can search for a word but does not search for single characters. The current study uses NWJC because it has no upper limits and can search for a particular character. Results are compared with the frequency of kanji in newspapers and Tokuhiro (2013).

Results show that the most frequent kanji from 1-10 are 日 人 出 大 一 思 今 見 事 分. For newspapers, it is 日 一 国 十 大 会 人 年 二 本. "思"(think) is most characteristic in the best 10 kanji suggesting that this kanji is used when describing opinion, thought or feeling. Kanji used to describe people's thinking is more frequent on websites than newspapers. Kanji representing Chinese numerals' frequency is lower. The 3,000 kanji list on the frequency order is also provided. Learning frequent kanji makes learner easier to read Japanese sentences on websites. This study contributes to Japanese kanji education.

References

Amano, S. & Kondo, T. (2008) NTT Database Series [Nihongo-no Goitokusei: Lexical Properties of Japanese] CD-ROM. Tokyo: Sanseido Co., Ltd.

Tokuhiro, Y. (2013) Research on Japanese Kanji; its Versatility and Occurrence of Frequency. 2013 Autumn Conference on Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language, Proceedings, 230-235.