🚀 go-pugleaf

Supplementing quickly a previous posting:

There are 51 katakana and 51 hiragana, but there are also a
few wrinkles to counting them: You can add accent-like
objects called "nigori" to about half of them. Two of the
hiragana and three of the katakana are no longer really
used (since the 1948 spelling reform). Three of the
hiragana and at least three of the katakana come in both
normal and small versions.

There are said to be only 2,000 "commonly used" kanji. The
1948 spelling reform singled out a specific set of about
2,000 as being "preferred" in some sense. However, the
computer character set standard for Japanese
(JISX0208-1983) gives numbers to 2965 "first level" kanji
and 3388 "second level" kanji. That standard also includes
the two kanas, the Latin, Cyrillic and Greek alphabets, and
a large assortment of special symbols.

Yours truly,
Flavio Rose
SynOptics Communications, Inc.