kalavinka's "Becoming literate in Japanese"

basic alphabet: hiragana and katakana (46 letters each)
joyo kanji: 1945 characters (what constitutes being literate)
[grade 1 (80), grade 2 (160), grade 3 (200), grade 4 (200), grade 5 (185), grade 6 (181), general use (939)]
once you learn all this, then you can move on to kanji reserved for people’s names(!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji