You say you're just going on vacation in Japan. 8 Mile Rua Das Ilusoes Dublado Com Legendado. Well, in that case, you might not need to know a whole lot of kanji. In fact, people go to Japan without knowing the language at all and manage to get around okay! So for your purposes, you might be fine without learning any kanji at all. But what if you're trying to learn the language for real?

The fact is, there aren't always furigana. Unless if you want to be illiterate, you'll need to be able to read words and names written with a number of kanji. 2500 is probably a good number, although educated native speakers can certainly read more than that. It's hard to come up with an exact figure, but the number is definitely much greater than zero! Even if you can only read a few hundred kanji, you'll be significantly better off. 'Learning a kanji' isn't a well-defined task, though.

What does it mean? Being able to recognize that the kanji exists?

This Pin was discovered by Suvi Sinkko-Latvala. Discover (and save) your own Pins on Pinterest. This page of Nihongo o Narau - Learn Japanese displays the 80 kanji learned in the first grade of elementary school.

Being able to write it from memory? Being able to rattle off a list of readings associated with the kanji? Probably the most useful skill is being able to read words written with a kanji, but there isn't a fixed list of words for each character (although the chart does list a number of examples). Regardless of how you define it, you can't learn 'all the kanji'.

Very large kanji dictionaries have upwards of 50,000 characters! However, you'll never see that many actually used. I have a character dictionary with only 8,000 characters, and even that is far more than I need to know. But many of those are names or other things which are likely to have furigana when they're introduced, so the real number you need to know is lower than that.

If I were you, I'd just learn kanji as you learn vocabulary. There's a lot more words in daily use than there are kanji, so before long you'll you know most of the kanji you need to know, and you'll find that the real problem is developing a large enough vocabulary. What's more, kanji actually help you break down vocabulary logically and understand words you don't know yet.

So do you need to know lots of kanji? In order to be literate, yes. To go on vacation in Japan? Probably not, but it couldn't hurt to learn some basics.