How many kanji?

[Saiyan]

Can someone please tell me if there is an exact number of kanji available? Thanks a lot!

[Javizy]

There are tens of thousands of these things, but luckily the Japanese have standardised a so-called jouyou set containing 1945 characters, which is enough to read most things, since additional characters require furigana by law. However, to read/write people's names and a lot of other proper nouns, such as place names, you need to know the additional jinmei-you set comprising 983 characters. I haven't started on the latter yet, so I don't know a whole lot about it, although I intend to learn it at some point. For more information, check out the Wiki page about Kanji http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji

[QuackingShoe]

since additional characters require furigana by law.

That's not quite true, except maybe for things like newspapers and other mass media. Other media can be written however the author (well, publisher) chooses, there's no actual regulation AFAIK. Otherwise things like 誰 and 俺 would get furigana all the time, and, well.. they never do at all, except in kid manga (where everything does). Those more blatant examples aside, I've been seeing a lot of non-jouyou characters with no furigana lately. It's common practice to use furigana with most of the non-jouyou (if only because they're uncommon), but it's certainly not law. The Japanese government isn't that oppressive.

The usual number I hear thrown out, frequency-wise, is like 90% of the characters you see are jouyou, however true that really is. So it does cover most of your bases.

[Psy]

Good information, guys. I'll add my own pithy breakdown:

Can someone please tell me if there is an exact number of kanji available? Thanks a lot!

There are many lists but no exact number. For near-native level competency you should shoot for 3,000 or so, though after you complete the jouyou it's safe to stop counting and learn new characters on a case-by-case basis, because by that point you'll have already covered the majority.

[Belton]

from Kanji Networks
an online etymological reference of 6500 characters

Naturally, 6,500 characters is but a fraction of all those that have ever been created. The Japanese standard is considered to be Dai Kan-Wa Jiten (大漢和辞典: revised and expanded version of 1960; edited by 諸橋轍次 [Morohashi Tetsuji] inter alia), which contains 50,000 characters. In China, a 1994 book lists 85,000 while another publication said to be on its way will apparently break the six-digit mark.

In other words there's a lot of them, thankfully only a small fraction are in common use.
I wonder if anyone really knows them all.

[Saiyan]

can someone suggest the number of kanji the children learn till they pass out of school? where can i find that list?

thank u!

[hatch_jp]

Please refer to the following sites.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Kanji
http://japanese.about.com/library/blkodarchives.htm