About Kanji Kaisen

Every page uses the same five signs, so once you can read one page you can read them all.

1. 1Colour tells you the theme

   Each of the ten themes has a colour, and a page takes the colour of the theme it belongs to. Nothing else is coloured: buttons are ink, and JLPT levels are plain labels. In 墨 every theme turns the same vermilion.

   • Nature
   • Body
   • Action
   • Home
   • Animals
   • Tools
   • Thought
   • Plants
   • States
   • Time

2. 2Lines tell you what a part does

   A solid line marks the part that carries the meaning, a dashed line the part that gives the sound, and a grey line a part that is only drawn in. In 海 (sea), 氵 says “water” and 毎 lends its sound, マイ, which 海 reads カイ.

   氵water(meaning)+毎マイ→カイ(sound)

3. 3Fill shows your ink

   Each kanji darkens through five shades as you meet, recall, trace and write it: 白 Not met, 淡 Met, 中 Learning, 濃 Familiar and 印 Mastered. You can also set a shade yourself. A wrong answer never lowers one. A theme, a radical or a study deck shows one painted bar, and that is the only progress mark.

   Not metMasteredInk shades, lightest to darkest: 白 Not met, 淡 Met, 中 Learning, 濃 Familiar, 印 Mastered

4. 4Stories are labelled

   An origin is what the sources say about how a character was formed. It is set upright and always names its source. A memory story is a mnemonic written for this site. It is set in a slanted serif and labelled “made up”, so you never mistake it for history.

   Origin · sourced

   休: a man leaning against a tree, resting.

   Ideogrammic compound · Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0

   Memory story · made up to help you remember

   “A person leans on a tree to take a break.”

5. 5Only what moves lights up

   In 夜, the stroke being drawn and the learn step you are on light up. Headings, buttons and cards never do, and in 墨 nothing lights up at all.

Most kanji are made of smaller parts. One part usually hints at the meaning and, in most kanji, another hints at the sound: 海 (sea), 泳 (swim) and 池 (pond) all carry 氵, the water radical, while 毎 gives 海 its カイ reading, as it does in 悔 and 梅. Learning the parts first turns a wall of strokes into a few familiar pieces.

We keep two kinds of explanation apart. Origin is what the sources say about how a character was formed, with a link to each source, and the ancient forms come only from public-domain or CC0 files. A memory story is a mnemonic written for this site. It can help you remember a kanji, but it isn't history.

There are no hearts, streaks or review queues. Each kanji darkens through five shades of ink as you meet, recall, trace and write it, and you can set the shade yourself at any time. Save kanji to My list and review them with flashcards or a quick quiz on the Study page. Teachers can print worksheets, present on a projector and share sets from Teach, with no student accounts. Everything stays in this browser. The older step-by-step path is still available as classic practice.

• KanjiVG

  Ulrich Apel and contributors

  Stroke order diagrams and animations, worksheets, share cards, radical positions, and which part of a kanji gives its meaning or its sound.

  Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0

• Kanji alive

  The Kanji alive team

  Radical groups and the hand-picked example words shown first on kanji pages.

  Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International

• KANJIDIC2

  The Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG)

  Meanings in their dictionary order, on/kun readings, stroke counts, school grades and newspaper frequency ranks.

  Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (EDRDG licence)

• JMdict

  The Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG)

  Common example words for kanji that Kanji alive doesn't cover.

  Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (EDRDG licence)

• JmdictFurigana

  Doublevil

  Which reading of a kanji each example word uses, so words can be grouped by reading.

  Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0

• Unihan database

  Unicode, Inc.

  The "In Chinese" note (simplified and traditional forms, pinyin), old character forms, and which kanji are jōyō or name kanji.

  Licence: Unicode License v3

• Wiktionary

  Wiktionary contributors

  Glyph origins shown under "Origin" and "How it was built". Each one links to the page revision it was taken from.

  Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0

• Wikimedia Commons: Ancient Chinese characters project

  Commons contributors; tracings from Academia Sinica 小學堂

  Oracle bone, bronze and seal forms in the journeys. Only public-domain files and CC0 tracings from Academia Sinica are used; files sourced from Richard Sears are excluded.

  Licence: Public domain / CC0 (per file)

• Academia Sinica 小學堂 字形演變

  Academia Sinica (Institute of History and Philology, Institute of Information Science, ASCDC)

  Oracle bone, bronze and seal forms for journey stages that Commons can't fill. Glyphs are used as served: cropped, made transparent and recoloured, never redrawn. Each one is listed on the ancient form credits page.

  Licence: CC0 1.0 (glyph images and glyph data)

Data for a few kanji (分, 誰, 的 and others) was first taken from davidluzgouveia/kanji-data, which is also derived from KANJIDIC. JLPT levels are unofficial: the JLPT has not published kanji lists since 2010, so levels follow the community lists used by kanjiapi.dev, and jōyō kanji missing from those lists are shown as N1. Material adapted from the share-alike sources above (stroke diagrams, part roles, example words, glyph origins) is shared under the same licence as its source.

The site is open source on GitHub under the MIT license (the data keeps its own licences above). Found a wrong reading or a story that doesn't hold up? Tell us on the feedback board.

Kanji Kaisen is made by Harry Sui. Find more at harrysui.me or write to muggle6594@gmail.com.