About kanji

Kanji are the Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese logographic writing system along with hiragana, katakana, and the Arabic numerals.

Kanji are ideograms, in which each character has its own meaning and corresponds to a word. By combining characters, more words can be created. For example, the combination of "electricity" with "car" means "train".
Electricity = 電
Car = 車
Electricity (電) + Car (車) = Train (電車)


There are several ten thousands of characters, of which around 2000 to 3000 are required to understand newspapers. A set of 1945 characters has been officially declared as the "kanji for everyday use" or jouyoukanji.

In japanese language, the kanji will have one reading for its original chinese meaning as well as other readings for its various Japanese meanings. Indeed, it is unusual for a single character to have three, four, and even five or more variant readings. Native-japanese readings is called "kun-yomi", while chinese readings is called "on-yomi".
This multiplicity of readings and even meanings makes kanji a special problem for the student of Japanese. In this website we will try to provide some videos and image on how to draw the kanji together with the readings and meanings.