Your First Kanji
Kanji aren't random. They're puzzles built from pieces you can learn to recognize.
See how it works →Forget memorization. Understand the system.
Most people think kanji are thousands of arbitrary shapes you have to brute-force into memory. That's the hard way. The easier way: learn the building blocks.
Kanji are made of components — simple pieces that combine into meaning. Once you see the pattern, every new kanji becomes a puzzle, not a chore. Let us show you.
Sun + Moon = Bright
Here are two of the simplest kanji:
Now watch what happens when you put them together:
日 (sun) + 月 (moon) = 明 (bright). When the sun and moon are both out, it's bright. That's not a coincidence — that's how kanji were designed.
Tree → Grove → Forest
Here's another pattern. Start with one tree:
Put two trees side by side:
Stack three trees together:
木 → 林 → 森. One tree, a grove, a forest. And 森 decomposes into 木 + 林 — a tree plus a grove makes a forest. Every kanji page on Kakuso shows this decomposition tree.
This is what you'll see in the dictionary
Every kanji page in our dictionary shows a component analysis tree — the same breakdown you just learned, laid out as a tree. Here's exactly what you'd see if you opened the pages for 明 and 森:
Tap any kanji to jump to its full dictionary page and explore all readings, meanings, example words, and the complete decomposition.
Your first real Japanese word
You know 明 means bright. But in Japanese, kanji rarely stand alone — they team up with hiragana:
See the hiragana るい trailing after the kanji? That's called okurigana — literally "accompanying kana." It's the hiragana tail that turns a kanji root into a specific word. Here, 明 gives the meaning "bright," and るい makes it the adjective (as in "the room is bright").
This is how real Japanese works. Kanji carry the core meaning. Hiragana fills in the grammar. And you already know every character in this word — the kanji from this lesson and the hiragana from your very first lesson.
Now write the whole thing
Practice 明るい with stroke validation — kanji and hiragana together, exactly like you'd write it in a sentence.
明るい
Practice Writing
When the pieces don't tell a story
Not every kanji is as satisfying as sun + moon = bright. Take 気 — it means spirit, mind, air, energy. Look at its components:
The top part 气 is called the "steam" radical. The rest — 𠂉, 一, ⺄, 㐅 — are small shapes that don't carry meaning on their own in modern Japanese. Understanding their etymological origins goes well beyond what most learners need. But you can still break any kanji down into these smaller pieces that reappear across characters, and sometimes they're given pedagogical names to help you memorize them.
That's the real point: even when a kanji doesn't tell a neat story, you can still decompose it into familiar fragments. The dictionary breaks every character down for you, and FSRS-6 handles the rest with perfectly-timed reviews.
Find anything in the dictionary
The Kakuso dictionary covers over 10,000 kanji and 200,000 words. You can search by Japanese character, English meaning, hiragana reading, or even romaji — and mix them freely.
Try searching for "気" — wrapping a character in double quotes finds an exact match. You'll get the kanji page with all its readings, meanings, and the decomposition tree you just saw.
Now try typing "気 mind" — mixing a kanji with an English word. The search narrows to entries matching both.
Pay attention: there's a kanji page for 気 (the character itself, with every reading and meaning) and separate vocabulary entries like 気 read as け (sign, indication). Same character, different words, different readings. You can add each one to your study list independently — practice exactly what you need.
Write them
Same stroke validation as your kana practice — but now you're writing characters with meaning.
日 → 月 → 明
Practice Writing
木 → 林 → 森
Practice Writing
Now go explore on your own
The best way to learn is to find something you actually want to read — a manga panel, a song lyric, a tweet — and look up every word you don't know. Add them to your study list, practice writing them, and let the spaced repetition bring them back at the perfect time. Before you know it, you'll be reading — and writing — things you never thought possible.
If you're looking for beginner reading material, Tadoku offers a collection of free graded readers written for Japanese learners.
Fair warning: Level Zero stories use very simple words, and many of them are commonly written in hiragana only — you won't find all of them in a kanji dictionary. But some you will. Remember すし?
Save your progress (free)
You can practice freely without an account. When you finish a row, Kakuso will offer to save the characters to your study list, so you can continue with spaced repetition reviews — completely free, forever.
Learn kanji components. How kanji are built from radicals. Sun plus moon equals bright. Tree, grove, forest. Okurigana explained. Component analysis trees. Free kanji practice with stroke validation and spaced repetition.