Learn Japanese Kanji: The Best Way to Master Kanji and Radicals Without Memorizing

The kanji are one of the three "alphabets" used to write Japanese, alongside the hiragana (ひらがな ) and katakana (カタカナ ). Whereas the hiragana and katakana are completely phonetic and simply represent sounds, each kanji is a unique symbol that has a specific meaning. For example, the word "kanji" (漢字(かんじ) ) literally means "Chinese" (漢) "character" (字).

Given this relationship between kanji and Japanese words, learning Japanese means learning a lot of kanji. Everything written in Japanese is written in kanji, from books to subtitles to street signs. Menus in restaurants include kanji, and Japanese dictionaries are organized by the parts a word's kanji contains. Even beginner textbooks quickly phase out romanizations and hiragana in favor of kanji.

This deep dive contains everything you need to know to start learning kanji. We'll cover:

How Japanese Kanji Work

Very generally speaking, here's the anatomy of a kanji character:

So the stroke "丨" (tatebou, vertical line) appears in the component 日 (day), this component appears in the character 時 (time), and this character appears in the word 時間 (じかん, time/period).

Unfortunately, things do get a little more complicated. Some strokes double as components, some components double as characters, and some words consist of a single character. If you're feeling overwhelmed, just remember this:

Radicals (部首), the core of each kanji

The oldest form of written Chinese we know of, the Oracle Bone Script, dates back to before 1,000 BC. Some of these characters are similar enough to our modern charcters to be recognizable, but they were not standardized and came in many variations.

Over a thousand years later, the scholar Xu Shen created the Shouwen Jiezi, a dictionary that contained a detailed analysis of the usage and structure of characters used in The Five Classics (of the Han dynasty). What's special about this dictionary is that:

And nobody had done anything like this before.

Xu Shen called these shared sequences of strokes "radicals ()" , which literally means section (部) head/chief (首): the shared component that he felt defined/headed a section/group of characters.

We still use this same system of classification today, but we now recognize only 214 unique radicals, as opposed to Xu Shen's 500+.

The structure of kanji

You might believe me when I tell you that the radical of 時 is 日, but you probably also have another question: what about that 寺 on the right side? Don't we care about it?

And that's an important question!

To answer it, it's important to understand that Xu Shen was observing and analyzing the kanji, and he did so in several different ways. For example, by:

If you've got a moment, you can try this for yourself:

The 4 (main) types of kanji

Combining the concepts of components, radicals, and radical placement, plus earlier work from other scholars, Xu Shen identified four types of kanji. (Actually 6, but the other two are more contested and less useful for learners, so we'll skip them.)

Over half of the kanji are phonetic-semantic characters, so as you learn more vocabulary words, you'll eventually develop a somewhat-accurate intuition for how a new character likely sounds. This is one reason that kanji get easier to learn as you learn more of them.

Onyomi and Kunyomi, the reading/pronunciation of kanji

We can now finally address a question that's likely been on your mind: if this is Japanese, then why are we talking about Chinese characters?

And the answer is pretty straightforward: Japan originally lacked a writing system and China was a major influence in the region. Oversimplifying quite a bit, bilingual court officials basically forced the Chinese characters onto native Japanese words. Some Chinese words were also borrowed into Japanese. (If you have some time, it's a cool story.)

As you might imagine, this got messy. Virtually all characters have some Japanese readings and some Chinese readings, and while you can usually guess whether a Chinese or Japanese reading will be used, you can't always guess which of the various Chinese or Japanese readings will be used. You just have to learn them as you go.

To briefly compare these two different ways of reading kanji:

Then, remember how I said that there wasn't a reliable way to guess the way to pronounce a character? There's even a handful of two-kanji words in which one kanji uses kun'yomi and the other uses on'yomi (link is in Japanese). A common example is (daidokoro , kitchen), in which 台 has the on'yomi reading "dai" and 所 has the kun'yomi reading "dokoro".

All these rules and exceptions in mind, we recommend not actively trying to memorize the on'yomi and kun'yomi of a kanji. You'll acquire this knowledge naturally as you learn more Japanese words. We'll talk about this more in the section on learning kanji.

How many kanji characters do you need to know?

This depends entirely on what you want to do with Japanese.

This all goes to say that if you Google how many kanji should I learn, different places will give you different answers.

I would personally recommend worrying less about the number of kanji you know and more about the number of words. The context provided by vocabulary words will make it easier to remember the kanji they contain, and focusing on words also saves you from spending time on technical/obscure kanji that you may never actually see in real life.

Tips to Learn Kanji Efficiently

Now you understand that kanji aren't just squiggles on a page... but how do you go about learning over a thousand unique characters?

Use mnemonics to help memorize kanji

Here's a 4-time memory champion talking about how he memorizes things. It boils down to turning information into something he can visualize, and he does that by making mnemonics. This is a three-step process:

The "lego blocks put together" nature of kanji lends itself really well to making mnemonics. For example, here's one story I made that's stuck with me for ten years:

That might look like a lot of work, but before long, making these stories becomes second nature. It's easier than you think, and can even be kind of fun. Best of all, that silly story transforms 始 from 8 random strokes into 3 meaningful parts.

If you're looking for a way to memorize kanji, mnemonics should be in your toolbox.

Write kanji out by hand

You'll benefit in a few key ways:

This third point—the difference between recognition and recall—is especially important. It's much easier to reach a point where you can recognize the kanji when you see them than it is to reach a point where you can write them from memory.

While this is bad news if you're planning to handwrite lots of letters in Japanese, the good news is that there are very few times when you actually need to write the characters out by hand. Remembering how they look is good enough, and this isn't as hard as you might think.

Use a spaced repetition system (SRS)

Spaced repetition is an algorithm-supported approach to reviewing information that solves three important learning problems. It tells you:

The SRS then keeps track of your performance with each of those things to help organize your studies:

Here's a way to visualize that process. In the below image, box #1 is reviewed most often (daily) and box #5 is reviewed least often (perhaps once a month).

It's a simple practice, but it yields a very powerful result: you spend more of your time practicing the things you need to practice and waste less of your time reviewing things you already know well. As someone who has used SRS software for over 10 years, I personally consider them to be modern-day magic. So long as you're consistent, pretty much everything that goes into your SRS will eventually end up in your long-term memory.

Many of the tools and resources we'll cover down below come equipped with built-in spaced repetition systems. It's just that powerful. Everybody who knows what it does wants to take advantage of it.

Consume Japanese content to learn words and kanji simultaneously

You see, spaced repetition is kind of like going to the gym. It'll make you stronger, and that's helpful for playing sports, but getting good at basketball is more than just having big muscles. It also requires playing a lot of basketball. Similarly, spaced repetition should complement your immersion (using Japanese to do cool things), not replace it.

We think that a big part of the "secret" to learning languages is simply spending a lot of time enjoying yourself in the language, so we built a tool that makes it possible for beginners to do that. You see, when you're watching anime or reading Murakami Haruki, you aren't just having fun. You're also making important observations about Japanese.

For example, consider these three words:

Notice that all three of them share the 学 character, that they all contain "gaku", and that they're all related to school/education? Well, that's no accident! The character 学 means "learn", and its on'yomi is "gaku". So long as you know these three words, you get this information about the kanji they contain for free. This is much more efficient than focusing on each individual kanji one-by-one.

Tools and Resources for Kanji Learning

Now that you know how kanji work and have a couple ideas about how to approach them, all that's left is to get started. Here are several tools that I have personally experimented with. I recommend:

People have successfully learned kanji and made progress in Japanese with each of the below tools, so there isn't necessarily a single "right" option. At the end of the day, what really counts is whether you end up seeing the resource through to the end or not.

Kanji textbooks

1. Remembering the Kanji (RTK)

It would be hard to talk about kanji resources without bringing up Remembering the Kanji by Dr. James W. Heisig. The book begins with a practical guide to building mnemonics and then a suggestion of how to make your own flashcards to study the book's material. After providing that background, the book guides you through all of the kanji in a progressive format:

Looking at this photo above—the idea here is that you learned 口 (mouth) in chapter one, and in chapter three you've just learned 千 (thousand), so now you're putting 口 and 千 together to make 舌 (tongue). The stories give you a mental path to follow so that, hopefully, if you remember 口 or 千, you can also find your way to 舌. After the first several chapters, Heisig expects you to begin making your own stories.

2. Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course (KKLC)

Published more recently in 2013, the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course is another book that in many ways builds on RTK. The basic idea is the same—you see characters, keywords, mnemonics, and stroke order—but it also provides sample vocabulary words/phrases and notes about common on'yomi/kun'yomi readings. In my personal experience, I've found that people who dislike RTK seem to like KKLC.

Whereas RTK is more of an exercise book that you work through, the KKLC is more like a reference material—a big kanji book. The author also has a detailed companion website that covers, among other things, how to study with KKLC

Apps and websites

1. Skritter

We talked about handwriting above—most learners don't realistically need to learn to write in Japanese, but if you're artsy or you just like handwriting, you'll like Skritter.

Skritter has you learn kanji by writing them. Its handwriting recognition is excellent, and it will even provide you with stylistic feedback to make your characters look nicer. As the app observes your writing, it uses a spaced-repetition system to schedule characters for review in the future.

2. WaniKani

If you turned Remembering the Kanji into an app, updated it to also teach kanji readings and vocabulary, and then had a great design team set their sight on kanji flashcards, you'd have WaniKani.

The app follows a similar progression as RTK—you learn a few new radicals, then learn a few kanji you can build using those radicals, then learn a few vocab words which include those kanji—and everything you learn is built on top of a spaced repetition system, so you'll end up committing the things you learn to memory if you stay consistent with your studies.

3. Anki

Anki is an open-sourced application for learning content via flashcards that's backed by a powerful spaced repetition algorithm. It's not specifically for learning Japanese—you can use it for anything—but there are many free community decks available, some of which were obviously the result of many hours of work by passionate learners.

The biggest advantage and disadvantage of Anki is that you'll need to learn how to use it. It's an open-source sandbox with a somewhat significant learning curve. If you enjoy tweaking settings to get things exactly the way you like them, and get annoyed with the quality of the content in mass market learning materials, you'll probably like Anki.

To give you an example of the cool things you can do with Anki, here's a kanji learning tool we built for it: Migaku Kanji GOD.

The front of the flashcard contains those 4 characters you see at the top. After you flip the card over, you'll see this additional information. At the very bottom of the card, we've also gathered several mnemonic stories you can use to remember the kanji.

4. Migaku & Migaku Memory

It's a bit cheeky to recommend our own app, but we think we have something special. We're a team of DIY language learners who came together to build our own tool. It comes in four parts:

We think that the most important learning happens when you're using Japanese to enjoy yourself, so we built a tool that enables you to get into real Japanese content as soon as possible.

When you encounter a useful word while consuming content, you can click a button to create a high-quality flashcard that includes a screenshot, audio snippet, dictionary definition, your selected word's source sentence, an optional translation, and more. These flashcards are then sent to Anki or Migaku Memory.

Click here to see the app in action.

Miscellaneous resources

Japanese dictionaries

For computer: Jisho.org | For iOS: Shirabe Jisho | For Android: Takoboto

These are the free dictionaries I personally use across my various devices. They're all free and useful in a pinch. Here's what I like about each one:

Grid paper

If you go take calligraphy lessons in Japan, you'll practice by writing the kanji on 4x4 grids. Symmetry and proportions are an important part of kanji, and if you don't naturally have a knack for handwriting, your characters will probably come out looking pretty funky. Practice with grid paper helps with that.

The Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT)

All of the resources we've shared so far are from independent creators and companies, but if you want to do this more officially, you might find it motivating to work through the JLPT levels in sequential order: it shrinks the infinitely-big goal of "learning Japanese" down into the more manageable "let's just pass one test at a time."

Here are JLPT kanji practice books in order:

Note that the JLPT does not test writing or speaking, so these books will not help you learn to write the kanji. (If that's what you want, check out the KKLC Green Book from the above section). Instead, they will test you on things like whether you know how to read a certain kanji or which kanji compound is the most suitable choice to complete a sentence.

Following the above links will let you see a sample lesson from each book.

What I wish I knew before I began my kanji learning journey

In fall 2014 I moved to Japan to finish my degree (anthropology students had to spend two years abroad), and I passed the JLPT N1 in 2022. I moved to Taiwan and began learning Mandarin in spring 2018, and passed a Mandarin proficiency test of similar difficulty in 2024. Suffice it to say that I've spent a lot of time with these characters.

If I could go back to 2014, knowing what I know now, here are some of of the things I'd tell myself about learning kanji:

Mediocre workouts done religiously outperform perfect workouts never done

I'm going to go out on a limb here: you've probably read six blog posts, watched two YouTube videos, and spent way too many hours on Reddit in search of the most optimal way to learn kanji.

You're ready for this, friend.

People have learned Japanese successfully by using each of the tools we mentioned above... and people have also learned Japanese effectively without using any of them. If you've already spent a few days researching kanji learning strategies, just jump in. Pick an approach that seems useful and sustainable to you. Keep at it for at least 30 days. When that time has passed, take a moment to reflect on your progress. Keep going if you're happy, make an adjustment if you're not.

You could spend a year theorizing about the best way to learn kanji... but if you'd instead just learned six to seven new kanji per day using whatever old method, you'd have learned all the kanji you need for the highest-level Japanese proficiency test in that year.

Don't let "perfect" be the enemy of "good enough" 🙂

Whatever method you pick, you won't be done with the kanji when you finish it

For the most part, kanji learning tools are like training wheels. They'll teach you to ride a bike, but being able to stay upright on a bicycle doesn't mean you're ready for the Tour de France.

Pick your resource and get through it, but don't spend a ton of time or effort on it. You don't need to learn its contents like the back of your hand. Your only real goal right now is to learn the kanji just well enough to begin consuming Japanese content, which is where the real learning happens.

So how do you get really good at the kanji?

Today, the kanji feel like letters to me. I see them and they just "have" sound and meaning. To super condense how I got here:

It might seem counterintuitive, but if you're reading books or even just subtitles, you'll end up seeing thousands of kanji being used in natural contexts per day. Your brain is a pattern recognition machine and will do impressive things with all that context.

For example, you'll see a line of dialogue where someone says that their 日 hurts. You'll initially be confused: what does it mean for your sun to hurt? Then you'll look closer and see that this is actually 目 (eye) not 日 (sun). Suddenly, you appreciate this little detail. You'll accumulate hundreds of little experiences like this, and before you know it, kanji just won't be that difficult anymore.

Don't study for long blocks of time; instead, mobilize your downtime

Here's an interesting tidbit from learning psychology: we tend to better remember the first and last few items in a series better than the stuff in the middle. You've probably heard that it's better to learn in many short sessions instead of one long one, and this is part of the reason for that.

Flashcards are great for this. When you're walking to a class or to lunch, heading to the bathroom, waiting on the microwave, rolling your eyes at a commercial—that's the perfect time to sneak in four or five flashcards. Getting your learning done throughout the day like this reduces stress and preserves your free time in the evenings.

We've actually got an entire beginner's Japanese course in flashcard format. You can try it free for ten days and don't need to input payment information or anything like that, so you can see how the "mobilize your downtime" approach works for you and then commit later.

What to do when you're feeling burned out

If you're like most people, you'll decide you want to learn a million kanji by tomorrow, start spending forty hours a day on this... and at some point begin realizing that this might not be sustainble. Do you quit Japanese?

No.

Here's one of my favorite quotes:

The perspective I've learned to have is that life is long and that my livelihood doesn't depend on speaking perfect Japanese. What Japanese brings to my life is value/satisfaction, and I hope to enjoy that for as long a period of time as possible.

When I feel burned out, I take a break. I keep watching YouTube, reading, listening to city pop—the stuff I love—but I don't study or do anything that takes energy.

A short trip is better than a long fall.

FAQs: Common problems & how to overcome them

We talked about more holistic "learning how to learn" stuff above. Now, we'll get into a few concrete kanji problems that you're inevitably going to encounter.

How do I keep all of these on'yomi and kun'yomi straight?

Don't! For now, ignore the readings and focus on consuming content and learning vocabulary. As you do that, you'll naturally learn the on'yomi and kun'yomi.

For example, here are a few basic words you'll learn early on that include the kanji 日 (sun), for example:

There's never a situation outside of school where somebody is going to stop you and ask you to recite all the readings of a particular kanji... but if you know a few words with 日, you'll also know that 日 can be pronounced as "ni", "shita", and "bi".

How do I retain all of this information about the kanji?

Language is one of those things where if you don't use it, you lose it. That in mind, you have two main options available to you:

The great thing about reading books and watching j-dramas (and so forth) is that they act as a kind of natural spaced repetition system. When you consume content in Japanese, you'll be prompted to remember kanji and make sense of thousands of words. You'll quickly reach a point where basic words, kanji, and grammar points just make sense to you, and as you continue doing what you enjoy doing, you'll gradually master all of the things you need to know to do that thing well.

So: put in a bit of work to learn the basics, start spending time in Japanese, then continue enjoying yourself in Japanese.

What do I do if I confuse one kanji with another kanji?

In practice, know that this isn't as big of an issue as it seems like it would be.

土 (earth) and 士 (samurai/scholar) look really similar, and if you only ever see these words in workbooks or flashcards, they're indeed confusing! But if you're actually watching anime or talking to people, there just aren't that many situations when "earth" and "scholar" are interchangeable. Context pretty much solves the "similar kanji" problem for you.

But let's say that something does trip you up. I personally struggled with 隠 (conceal) vs 穏 (calmness), for example. My first step is always to isolate the characters and compare the kanji radicals. Here, we see that 隠 has 阝 and that 穏 has 禾.

Simply noticing this difference may be enough to resolve your confusion, but if not, here are a few "next steps" I've taken and found helpful:

What happens when I come across a kanji I don't recognize?

Even just twenty years ago, you'd be stuck. If you had a paper dictionary, you'd need to know the kanji's radical and then look it up. If you had an electronic dictionary, you'd have to know the correct stroke order, put your book down, and draw the kanji. This was a painful process.

Nowadays, parsing written Japanese is much easier. The technology we have today makes it very easy to read Japanese, so long as your content is digital:

Either of these options represent an incredible improvement over paper dictionaries, so I strongly recommend beginning your Japanese journey with digital media.

I can read kanji just fine, but I never remember how to write them

It's not just you! There's actually a Chinese proverb about this: . Literally meaning "take pen, forget character", this refers to the phenomenon in which native speakers are forgetting how to write some characters by hand because nowadays we use computers and phones.

When you type Japanese on a computer, you see a little menu like this after typing nihongo:

So you don't actually have to remember how to write (nihongo, Japanese). All you have to do is pick the right word out of the list. If you know how to read kanji, you effectively know how to read and write kanji.

... Kanji seem too difficult. What if I just want to speak Japanese?

This might seem like a good idea right now, but it'd probably end up being more difficult to learn Japanese without the kanji than it is to learn it with them. As we mentioned in the introduction, there is virtually no content in Japanese that doesn't have kanji. If you skip them, you'd be limiting yourself almost entirely to learning Japanese by talking with Japanese people. That's not super practical.

Here's some good news for you:

Now consider that a college-educated native speaker knows about 30,000 words. That's a lot to look up! An English speaker will struggle with that for their entire life—just yesterday I looked up the word macroscian—but this isn't as big of a deal in Japanese.

Some closing thoughts

Wow! That was a lot. We initially planned this to be a ~2,000 word post, but it ended up being ~6,000... and there's still more I could say about the kanji.

For now, fellow Japanese learner, know that this is going to be a challenge and require commitment. Nevertheless, it gets better. You'll struggle, you'll grow, and you'll feel accomplished. I dare say that most learners who make it through the beginner phase end up loving the kanji.

If you'd like to take this journey together, check out Migaku Japanese.