four-stroke primary radical meaning "tree". When there is no obvious radical or more than one radical, convention governs which is used for collation. Other kanji sorting methods, such as the SKIP system, have been devised by various authors. Modern general-purpose Japanese dictionaries (as opposed to specifically character dictionaries) generally collate all entries, including words written using kanji, according to their kana representations (reflecting the way they are pronounced). The gojūon ordering of kana is normally used for this purpose. Kanji education Japanese schoolchildren are expected to learn 1,026 basic kanji characters, the kyōiku kanji, before finishing the sixth grade. The order in which these characters are learned is fixed. The kyōiku kanji list is a subset of a larger list, originally of 1,945 kanji characters and extended to 2,136 in 2010, known as the jōyō kanji—characters required for the level of fluency necessary to read newspapers and literature in Japanese. This larger list of characters is to be mastered by the end of the ninth grade. Schoolchildren learn the characters by repetition and radical. Students studying Japanese as a foreign language are often required by a curriculum to acquire kanji without having first learned the vocabulary associated with them. Strategies for these learners vary from copying-based methods to mnemonic-based methods such as those used in James Heisig's series Remembering the Kanji. Other textbooks use methods based on the etymology of the characters, such as Mathias and Habein's The Complete Guide to Everyday Kanji and Henshall's A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters. Pictorial mnemonics, as in the text Kanji Pict-o-graphix by Michael Rowley, are also seen. The Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation provides the Kanji kentei ( Nihon kanji nōryoku kentei shiken; "Test of Japanese Kanji Aptitude"), which tests the ability to read and write kanji. The highest level of the Kanji kentei tests about six thousand kanji. See also Chinese influence on Japanese culture Braille kanji Hanja (Korean equivalent) Chữ Hán (Vietnamese equivalent) Han unification Chinese family of scripts Japanese script reform Japanese typefaces (shotai) Japanese writing system Kanji of the year List of kanji by stroke count Radical (Chinese character) Stroke order Table of kanji radicals Rōmaji Cangjie Notes References Citations Sources DeFrancis, John (1990). The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. . Hadamitzky, W., and Spahn, M., (1981) Kanji and Kana, Boston: Tuttle. Hannas, William. C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. Honolulu: University of Hawaii