How to learn kanji, one small habit at a time

The best way to learn kanji is a little at a time: a few new kanji every day, each one broken into the parts it’s built from and learned through a real word, with short reviews that come back after longer and longer gaps. Start with hiragana and katakana, then work through the kanji in order, from the simplest and most common up. It doesn’t take hours a day, just a small habit you keep.

Start with hiragana and katakana

Japanese is written with three scripts at once. Hiragana and katakana are two small sets of characters that each stand for a sound, like か (ka) or ス (su). Kanji carry meaning. One short sentence can use all three: in 毎朝パンを食べます (maiasa pan o tabemasu), “I eat bread every morning”, 毎朝 (every morning) and 食 (eat) are kanji, パン (bread) is katakana, and を and べます are hiragana.

Learn kana first, because kanji lean on them. The endings of verbs and adjectives are written in hiragana: in 食べる (taberu), to eat, and 食べた (tabeta), ate, the kanji stays the same and only the kana after it change. Readings are written in kana too, in dictionaries and in the small furigana printed above harder kanji, like this: 森もり. Hiragana, katakana and kanji explains how the three scripts work together.

Learn the parts that kanji are built from

Kanji aren’t thousands of unrelated pictures. Most are built from a much smaller set of parts that come back again and again, so every part you learn makes later kanji easier. Take 木 (ki), a tree. Two trees make 林 (hayashi), a grove, and three make 森 (mori), a forest:

Once you know 木, you’ll find it everywhere: in 休 (yasumu), to rest, where a person leans against it, in 本 (hon), a book, and on the left of 校, the kou in 学校 (gakkou), school.

Some parts change shape when they move to the side of a kanji. 人 (hito), a person, becomes 亻 on the left, as in 休. 水 (mizu), water, shrinks to three drops, 氵, in 海 (umi), sea, 池 (ike), pond, and 泳ぐ (oyogu), to swim. When you meet a new kanji, look first for the parts you already know.

Parts don’t only carry meaning. Many kanji pair one part for the meaning with another for the sound. 青 (ao), blue, is read sei in words like 青年 (seinen), a young person, and it lends that sound to other kanji:

Many dictionaries sort kanji by a traditional set of 214 radicals, which comes from an 18th-century Chinese dictionary. You don’t need to learn them as a list: learn each part when it turns up in a kanji you’re studying. Kanji radicals shows the ones you’ll meet most.

Learn each kanji through a real word

Most kanji have more than one reading. Onyomi are readings that came from Chinese, used mostly in compound words. Kunyomi are native Japanese words that were written with the kanji, used mostly on their own or with hiragana endings. A list of readings doesn’t tell you which one to pick. A word does.

Take 学, the kanji for learning. Its readings are gaku and mana(bu), but you don’t need to memorise them as a pair. Learn one common word first, then add others as you meet them:

Once you know a few of these, you can usually guess how to read the next word with 学 in it. Words also show how sounds change where two kanji meet: 学校 is gakkou, not gakukou.

• 私は学生です。

  Watashi wa gakusei desu.

  I'm a student.

• 姉は大学で日本語を学んでいます。

  Ane wa daigaku de nihongo o manande imasu.

  My sister is studying Japanese at university.

• 毎日、歩いて学校に行きます。

  Mainichi, aruite gakkou ni ikimasu.

  I walk to school every day.

A few words have a reading that belongs to the whole word. 今日 (kyou), today, is 今, now, plus 日, day, but neither kanji is read kyou on its own. Readings like that can only be learned as words. Onyomi vs kunyomi explains the two kinds of reading and how to tell them apart.

Use stories, but know which ones are history

A story turns a shape into something you can picture, and for many kanji the story is the real history. 休, to rest, really was built as a person leaning against a tree. 林 and 森 really were made by repeating 木: one tree, two trees, three trees shows how.

Other stories are memory aids. A handy way to remember 犬 (inu), dog, is 大 (big) with a dot: a big dog. Historically, though, 犬 isn’t built from 大 at all. It began as a drawing of a dog.

Some stories are half true. 晴 (hare), clear weather, looks like the sun plus blue: a sunny blue sky. The sun, 日, really is there for the meaning, but 青 was chosen for its sound, sei, as in the table above. And for some kanji, nobody knows: scholars still disagree about why the kanji for house has a pig in it.

All of these can help, as long as you know which kind you’re using. A made-up story covers one kanji, while the real structure often explains several at once, as 青 does for 晴, 清 and 精. When a kanji has no story that helps you, make up your own and keep it short.

• Kanji stories

  The kanji for rain has raindrops in it (雨)

• Travel & culture

  The sign on every Japanese hot spring (湯 and ♨)

• Kanji stories

  The kanji for friend is two hands (友)

Learn the stroke order from the start

Every kanji has a standard order and direction for its strokes, and a few rules cover most of them: top before bottom, left before right, and a horizontal stroke before a vertical one that crosses it, as in 十 (juu), ten. There are exceptions. A well-known pair is 右 (migi), right, and 左 (hidari), left: they look alike, but 右 starts with the slanting stroke and 左 with the horizontal one. The lesson on telling left from right has a trick for remembering which comes first.

Learn stroke order from your very first kanji. It makes your handwriting look right and lets you count strokes accurately, which is one of the ways kanji dictionaries are searched. Kanji stroke order rules goes through the rules with examples.

Add a few new kanji a day, and review them

Each day, learn a few new kanji and review the ones you’ve already met. The reviews follow a pattern called spaced repetition: when you’ve just learned a kanji, it comes back soon. Each time you get it right, the gap before the next review grows, from a day to a few days, then a week or more. When you get it wrong, it comes back sooner. The aim is to see each kanji again just before you’d forget it, so your time goes to the kanji that need it.

A few habits make it work:

• Review first, then learn new kanji. If you miss a few days, catch up on your reviews before adding more.
• Choose a number you can keep on your busiest day. Every new kanji brings reviews for weeks afterwards, so a big burst today means a pile of reviews later.
• Keep sessions short. A few minutes every day is easier to keep up than a long session once a week.

The numbers add up quickly. At 5 new kanji a day, you’d meet the 80 kanji on our N5 list in 16 days, and all 2,136 jōyō kanji, Japan’s official list of kanji for everyday use, in 428 days: about 14 months. At 3 a day the whole list takes 712 days, just under two years, and at 8 a day it takes 267 days, about 9 months.

Follow a level order

Start with kanji that are simple and common: numbers like 一, 二 and 三, 日 (sun, day) and 月 (moon, month), 人 (person), 山 (mountain), 大 (big) and 小 (small). Many of them are also parts of later kanji.

The levels of the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) make a convenient order, from N5, the easiest, to N1. The JLPT hasn’t published official kanji lists since 2010, so every level list is unofficial and every count is approximate. Our lists put 80 kanji at N5, 204 at N4, 507 at N3, 288 at N2 and 1,057 at N1, which together make up all 2,136 jōyō kanji. The JLPT N5 kanji list is the place to start, and how many kanji you need shows what each level lets you read.

Reading first, with some writing

As a learner, you’ll read kanji far more often than you write them: on screens, signs, menus and packaging. Typing doesn’t need handwriting either: you type the reading and pick the right kanji from a list.

Writing by hand still earns its place. Drawing a kanji makes you notice the details that tell look-alikes apart, like 人 (hito), person, and 入 (hairu), to enter, or 未 (mi), not yet, and 末 (sue), end. In 未 the top line is shorter than the one below it; in 末 it’s longer.

A balanced approach is to write each new kanji by hand a few times when you first learn it, to get to know its parts and stroke order, then review mostly by reading. If you need to write Japanese at school, at work or in an exam, give handwriting more time.

Keep kanji in sight during the day

Reviews aren’t the only time to meet the kanji you’re learning. It’s good to see them in passing too:

• Write today’s new kanji on a sticky note and put it where you’ll see it.
• Look for kanji in the Japanese around you: food packaging, product labels, signs in photos and videos. Each one you recognise is a small review.
• Put kanji on your phone’s Home Screen. Chirami’s widget does this on Android, and it changes through the day, showing the kanji you’re about to forget first, then today’s new ones. Learn kanji with a widget explains how it works.

Common mistakes

• Memorising readings without words. “Gaku, manabu” means little until you’ve seen 大学 and 学ぶ.
• Taking on too many at once. Twenty new kanji a day feels great for a week, then the reviews pile up. A pace you can keep matters more than a fast start.
• Learning new kanji but skipping reviews. The reviews are what turn kanji you’ve met into kanji you know.
• Treating every story as history. Memory aids are fine; just don’t build on one as if it were the kanji’s origin.
• Studying kanji only in isolation. Read real Japanese as early as you can, even short sentences. That’s where you see kanji at work.

Common questions

How long does it take to learn kanji?

At 5 new kanji a day, meeting all 2,136 jōyō kanji takes about 14 months; at 3 a day, just under two years; at 8 a day, about 9 months. Reading them comfortably takes longer, because that comes from meeting them again and again in real Japanese. For comparison, Japanese children learn their first 1,026 kanji over six years of primary school.

Should I learn kanji before hiragana?

No. Learn hiragana and katakana first. Kanji readings, word endings and furigana are all written in kana, so you need kana to study kanji at all. You can start your first simple kanji while you finish katakana.

Do I need to write kanji by hand?

Some writing helps, but you don’t need to write every kanji from memory to read Japanese, and typing only asks you to recognise the right kanji. Writing each new kanji a few times is enough to learn its parts and stroke order.

How many kanji should I learn a day?

Pick a number between 3 and 8, the one you could keep up on your busiest day, and always do your reviews first. Five a day is a comfortable middle.

The kanji in this guide

Tap Draw it to watch the stroke order. Numbers show where each stroke starts.

Draw it

Draw it

Draw it

Sources

• Agency for Cultural Affairs: Jōyō kanji table, 2010 (Japanese)
• MEXT: Primary school curriculum guide for Japanese, with the 1,026 kanji by school year (PDF, Japanese)
• JLPT: FAQ (no kanji lists since the 2010 revision)
• Wiktionary: 休 (glyph origin)
• Dong Chinese: 森
• Dong Chinese: 犬
• Dong Chinese: 晴
• Dong Chinese: 清
• Dong Chinese: 精
• Wikipedia: Kangxi radical (the 214 radicals)
• Jisho (KANJIDIC2): 学
• Jisho (JMdict): 今日

Written by the Chirami team with the help of AI, then checked against JMdict, KANJIDIC2 and the sources above. How we write. Spotted a mistake? Email support@brightsmilesolutions.org.