What Is Kanji? A Plain Guide for Beginners

Short answer: kanji are the Chinese characters used to write Japanese. Each one carries a meaning, and most have more than one reading. Japanese text mixes kanji with hiragana and katakana, and the official list for everyday use has 2,136 kanji.

Where kanji came from

The word kanji (漢字) means “Han characters”, the characters of China. They came to Japan from China more than 1,500 years ago, at a time when Japanese had no writing system of its own. Japanese scribes first used them to write Chinese, then to write Japanese, and over the following centuries simplified forms of some kanji became the two kana scripts, hiragana and katakana.

That history explains why most kanji have two kinds of readings: a Chinese-derived reading and a native Japanese reading (more below).

How many kanji are there?

It depends on what you count:

• Jōyō kanji: 2,136. This is the official list of kanji for general use, last revised in 2010. Newspapers, textbooks and official documents mostly stay within it.
• School kanji (kyōiku kanji): 1,026, taught over the six years of elementary school. See kanji by grade level.
• JLPT: the Japanese-Language Proficiency Test has published no official kanji list since 2010. Common estimates are about 100 kanji for N5 and about 2,000 for N1. See how many kanji are in each JLPT level.
• Dictionaries: large dictionaries list tens of thousands, most of them rare.

Kanji Guide covers 2,131 kanji, from N5 to N1.

What a kanji is made of

Each kanji is written with a fixed number of strokes in a fixed order. 一 (one) has 1 stroke; 語 (word, language) has 14. Most kanji are built from smaller parts. Some parts carry meaning, and some hint at the sound.

You can see parts at work in a few simple kanji:

• 木 is a tree. Two trees make 林 (grove). Three make 森 (forest).
• 日 is the sun or day, 月 the moon or month, and the two together make 明 (bright).
• 人 is a person; a person leaning on a tree is 休 (rest).

Not every kanji is a picture. Most are combinations, and many of them stand for abstract ideas. That is why learners use parts and short stories to remember them; see kanji mnemonics.

How kanji are read

Most kanji have at least one of two kinds of reading:

• On’yomi, the reading that came from Chinese, usually used in compound words. 山 is サン in 富士山 (Mount Fuji).
• Kun’yomi, the native Japanese reading, often used when the kanji stands alone. 山 is やま (mountain).

Some kanji have several of each. Which one to use depends on the word, so it is easiest to learn readings through words. See onyomi vs kunyomi.

Kanji, hiragana and katakana together

A normal Japanese sentence uses all three scripts:

私はコーヒーを飲みます。 (I drink coffee.)

Here 私 (I) and 飲 (drink) are kanji, コーヒー (coffee) is katakana, and は, を, み, ます are hiragana. Roughly:

• Kanji write the core of most words: nouns and the stems of verbs and adjectives.
• Hiragana write grammar: particles, verb endings, and words without a common kanji.
• Katakana write foreign loanwords, foreign names and some sound words.

For the scripts themselves, see the hiragana chart and the katakana chart. As for why Japanese keeps kanji at all: they mark word boundaries in a script with no spaces. See does kanji make Japanese harder to read. And for why some words are written in hiragana even when a kanji exists, see why use hiragana instead of kanji.

Is learning kanji hard?

It takes time, but it is very doable in small steps. A few points that help:

1. Learn hiragana and katakana first. Each takes days to weeks, not months.
2. Start with common kanji, such as the 81 kanji in the JLPT N5 list.
3. Learn a few a day and review. See how many kanji per day.
4. Learn each kanji with a word, so you also learn its reading in context.

For a step-by-step start, read how to learn kanji from zero.

Try a few

Kanji Guide gives every kanji a picture, a short story, its readings, example words and animated stroke order. Start with 日, 月 and 明, or open the study app and pick N5. It works in a phone browser, and there is an iPhone app.