Top Picks: Best Japanese Kanji Textbooks and Resources

Diving into the weird and wonderful world of kanji can be difficult without the right tools at your disposal. With over 2,100 "everyday-use" kanji needed to understand most general reading material, there’s no getting around the importance of kanji in Japanese. It’s not uncommon for beginners to feel overwhelmed at this stage, so finding the right resource to guide you is crucial for your next steps. You’ve come too far to give up now!

Whether you’ve learnt hiragana and katakana and hit a roadblock with kanji, or on the contrary, you’re all about those radicals, this article will introduce you to some of the best kanji learning materials.

Five kanji books / textbooks at a glance

In each kanji book's dedicated section, we’ll give a quick summary of the resource's content,which learning style each book is best suited for, how much of the aforementioned 2,100+ jōyō kanji each book covers, and whether the material is suited for JLPT study.

For now, here’s a quick overview of what we'll cover:

Learning kanji with books: different strokes for different folks

Before we introduce our top picks for books you can use to learn kanji, we have to make an important point:

To make sure your approach is delivering the results you want, it's important that you're actually spending time interacting with Japanese. If you find that reading Japanese is getting easier as you go, awesome! Your strategy is working. If it still feels like you’re deciphering ancient runes every time you open a book, this means that the way you are practicing isn't building the "muscles" you need to do the specific things you want to do. Take some time to reassess.

At the end of the day, though, everybody learns differently. More importantly, what works for you today might not feel good a year from now. All of the books below have helped people make real progress with Japanese—but that doesn’t mean they’ll automatically work for you. Think of them as tools, not magic spells. How you use them matters! So, experiment. Try different approaches out. Find something that works for you. There's no one right approach—different strokes for different folks, as the saying goes!

Essentially, we are only here to hand you the lightsaber, but it’s up to you to use it wisely.

1. Remembering the Kanji: Learn kanji via stories (mnemonics)

This series by James Heisig was first published in 1977, and it's still commonly recommended to this day. That should give you a strong indicator of this book’s monumental influence.

Unlike a traditional textbook, Remembering the Kanji (RTK) offers a mnemonic driven approach to learning kanji. Each chapter introduces a handful of new kanji components, which are the building blocks that make up a particular kanji character. Each component is given a meaning—many are accurate, but some were simply made up by Heisig for convenience—and you learn the kanji by combining these components to make mnemonic stories.

For example, in chapter one, you learn that the symbols 日 means "sun" and that 月 means "moon". In chapter two, you combine those two things, like lego blocks, to make 明:

You then continue on in this fashion, learning more components and making characters out of them. This means that while the first characters you learn will be very simple, they aren't necessarily very common. For example, lesson 2 introduces you to 旦 ("nightbreak") and 胆 ("gall bladder").

This leads us to a few important criticisms of Heisig's book:

The goal of the book, simply put, is to help you (a) remember the kanji and (b) have a rough idea what each one means. The idea is that getting this out of the way early will make your future studies easier.

Should you use Heisig's Learning the Kanji?

RTK is best suited for those looking to comb through the kanji system systematically at their own pace. Learners who prefer to learn common kanji first or learn by JLPT levels will likely feel limited.

If you like the idea of RTK but don't like the lack of vocabulary words/kanji readings, you might instead look into the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Course.

2. Kanji Dictionary 2500: The ultimate reference book for foreigners learning Japanese

In 2025, dictionaries have largely made the jump to the digital forefront, but for those looking for a physical dictionary we’ve got you covered.

The dictionary is broken up into three sections, and kanji within each section are organized by frequency:

Pretty straightforward!

Each kanji section comes with a litany of classifications (JLPT level, Jōyō number, etc.) along with example vocabulary and sentences featuring said kanji. Importantly, the meaning of each kanji (item 3 in the top-right box) is shown only in Japanese.

Here's two pages from that first section, so you can see how the book organizes information:

In the first chapter, kanji are organized by topic, such as "family" or "numbers". In the other chapters, kanji are organized into clusters that share the same radical, which can help you avoid misidentifying similar looking kanji. This also makes looking up unknown kanji easier—even if you don't know what a kanji means, you can clearly see if it has a 月 (moon/flesh radical) in it.

Should you use Kanji Dictionary 2500 for Foreigners Learning Japanese?

This dictionary is best suited for those who prefer to learn by frequency and JLPT classification. Additionally, as it is a dictionary, it is more designed for reference rather than study; you'll get lots of information about how each kanji is used, but no guidance as to how to learn the kanji in an organized or practical fashion.

3. Kanji Look and Learn: A visual approach to learning basic kanji

If two aforementioned books had a baby, it would likely look like the Kanji Look and Learn series.

Kanji L&L takes the mnemonics of RTK and the layout of resources in Kanji 2500 and mashes them together for a more curated learning experience. The only catch here is that you get 512 kanji, nearly 2,000 less than you would encounter in the prior recommendations.

So, why are we introducing such a seemingly "limited" textbook?

Kanji L&L was created by the same people that made Genki, and it covers all of the kanji you'll run into in Genki I (plus a bunch from Genki II). With this in mind, if you're using Genki to learn Japanese, you'll probably like this book, too!

With the amount of detail given to each kanji, you’ll build a sturdy foundation for the most common kanji that you'll see over and over again in Japanese.

Should you use Kanji Look and Learn (from the creators of Genki)?

Kanji Look and Learn is a textbook and workbook combo, unlike the previous recommendations. Thanks to the inclusion of a workbook, this series is perfect for those who are serious about handwriting the kanji (and why wouldn’t you be!). Additionally, if you have experience with the Genki I&II textbooks, you’ll find it a smooth transition to Kanji L&L since it’s also a Genki product!

Even though we live in the digital age, there’s still a world of benefit to be found in learning kanji by hand. Writing forces you to slow down and consider each radical–maybe not important for beginner kanji, but when you need to discern from 拾 and 捨 or 職 and 識, having muscle memory will help you recall the meaning quicker. Besides, isn’t it more fun to see a new language take form in your own handwriting?

4. Kanji in Context: A learning resource for intermediate / advanced students

A textbook and (two) workbook combo, Kanji in Context may be the resource you're looking for if you've already achieved a solid intermediate level of Japanese but feel like kanji is your weakest skill.

In the book's introduction, the publishers describe the book in four main ways:

This is kind of a lot, so please quickly take a glance at the below extract from the reference book (left) and workbook (right):

You learn by following the workbook—there are a bit over 150 chapters that introduce 10–15 kanji each, and each chapter is broken into three sections:

And then you lean on the reference book to get through the workbook.

Should you use Kanji in Context?

Kanji in Context was created by a Japanese-language school founded by Stanford University—it's quite comprehensive, and has been "academically" vetted, if that matters to you. You shouldn't use this book if (a) you are not comfortable with resources that are primarily in Japanese or (b) you prefer to have your hand held.

5. Shin Kanzen Master: Workbooks to prepare for the JLPT

Primarily concerned about passing the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT)? The Shin Kanzen Master (SKM) series has you covered.

SKM is a five-part series of workbooks (kanji, vocabulary, grammar, listening comprehension, reading comprehension) designed to ensure you know everything you need to know to pass the JLPT. They have kanji books available for N4, N3, N2, and N1, but none yet for the JLPT N5.

The textbooks are very systematic and intended to be studied at a fixed pace and in a fixed order (read the instructions!). Generally, though, you'll learn batches of kanji by working through five-part sections:

Sections 3–5 reflect the type of questions on the JLPT (minus the writing), and the mock tests contain exactly the sort of questions you'll encounter on the JLPT. As such, if you do well in the Shin Kanzen Master book, you can be sure that your kanji knowledge is sufficient to pass a particular JLPT level.

Should you use the Shin Kanzen Master kanji books?

Everything by Shin Kanzen master is thorough and well-produced, but it can sometimes be a bit too thorough. Use these books if you are planning to take the JLPT but are especially concerned about your kanji knowledge.

An all-in-one kanji course for people who want to jump into Japanese media

There's just something special about a physical book. We can't deny that.

... But, we do have to admit that many of these books are 30+ years old, and they're a bit dated.

First, you'll spend 2 weeks working through the Migaku Kanji Course. This step is similar to the Remembering the Kanji book from above—you'll learn to recognize kanji characters and remember their meanings by building mnemonic stories out of their components.

After this brief delay, you can start working through the Migaku Japanese Academy, where you'll learn the ~1,500 most common words in Netflix subtitles and a few hundred common Japanese grammar points. (Do the same amount of daily cards as you have been doing in the kanji course).

Importantly, you'll learn at least one example sentence for each of the kanji you learned in the previous step, and each flashcard only introduces one new piece of information (a vocab word or grammar point), so the learning curve is super smooth.

We'll periodically nudge you to review each of these cards, building a personalized review schedule based on your performance, to ensure that you eventually remember everything.

By the time you're done, you'll be ready to start exploring actual Japanese content. Migaku makes subtitles interactive in places like YouTube and Netflix, enabling you to tap on words to see what they mean or make a media-rich flashcard with a single press.

So:

So, what's the best kanji resource out there?

Ultimately, the best kanji book is the one that you'll stick with and actually use.

You see, kanji open up a wider, exciting world for you. Virtually everything in Japanese is in kanji—books, manga, anime, video games, movies, song lyrics, menus, you name it—so learning kanji is what will enable you to go beyond textbooks and explore things you're interested in. That's where things begin getting fun, and it's also where your learning will really take off.

And with that, it’s time for us to wish you luck on your kanji journey with whatever resource you choose to take on your adventure

Acquiring kanji will take time, so make sure to enjoy the journey and sniff the 花 along the way.