The short version: 忍者 is enduring person. 空手 is empty hand. 津波 is harbour wave. 絵文字 is picture character. Forty English words you already use are Japanese compounds, and between them they contain about 24 kanji - each of which then unlocks a dozen ordinary words. The hardest part of learning a character is attaching meaning to a shape, and for these, the meaning is already in your head.
Everyone starts kanji at the same wall. Two thousand one hundred and thirty-six characters in the 常用 list. A number so large that the sensible response is to feel slightly ill and open a different app.
So here is a different opening move. Before learning a single new thing, count what you are already carrying. Not vaguely - literally. You know what a ninja is. You know what karate is, what a tsunami is, what origami is, what an emoji is. Every one of those is a Japanese word with a kanji spelling and a literal meaning, and you have already done the hard half: the meaning is stored, the sound is stored. All that is missing is the shape.
Part 1 · The words you ownFighting, discipline and the character 道
Nature, home and things you have seen
Culture, art and internet
Food and drink
And four you would never guess
Forty words, twenty-four characters
Now the part that actually matters. Those forty words are not forty separate memory problems, because they share characters. And each shared character is a key that opens ordinary, everyday Japanese - the words on menus, station signs and job listings.
| Character | You met it in | Free words it unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| 手 | 空手 | 手紙 letter · 上手 skilled · 切手 stamp · 手術 surgery |
| 気 | 合気道 | 元気 well · 天気 weather · 気持ち feeling · 人気 popularity |
| 人 | 人力車 | 日本人 Japanese person · 大人 adult · 一人 alone · 人口 population |
| 力 | 人力車 | 努力 effort · 体力 stamina · 実力 real ability · 協力 cooperation |
| 車 | 人力車 | 電車 train · 自転車 bicycle · 駐車 parking · 車内 inside the carriage |
| 和 | 和牛 | 和食 Japanese food · 和室 tatami room · 平和 peace · 昭和 the Showa era |
| 画 | 漫画 | 映画 film · 計画 plan · 画面 screen · 動画 video |
| 屋 | 居酒屋 | 本屋 bookshop · 部屋 room · 八百屋 greengrocer · 屋上 rooftop |
| 酒 | 居酒屋 | 日本酒 sake · お酒 alcohol · 酒屋 liquor store · 飲酒 drinking |
| 先 | 先生, 先輩 | 先週 last week · 先月 last month · 優先 priority · 先に ahead |
| 文字 | 絵文字 | 文字化け garbled text · 大文字 capitals · 文章 writing · 作文 composition |
| 大 | 大君 | 大人 adult · 大学 university · 大丈夫 all right · 大切 important |
Five words English changed on the way over
Borrowing is never clean. These five will make you sound confidently wrong in Japan if you assume the English meaning travels back.
| Word | In English | In Japan |
|---|---|---|
| アニメ anime | Japanese-style animation | All animation. A Disney film is アニメ too. |
| 布団 futon | A folding sofa-bed frame | The bedding set laid out on tatami and put away each morning. |
| 火鉢 hibachi | A teppanyaki grill with a chef | A charcoal brazier for heating a room. The restaurant grill is 鉄板焼き. |
| 酒 sake | Rice wine specifically | Alcohol in general. The drink you mean is 日本酒. |
| お宅 otaku | An obsessive fan | Literally your house - a formal way of saying “you” before the fan meaning grew out of it. |
From “2,136 characters” to “2,112 to go”
That reframing is not a trick. It is the honest arithmetic of where you actually stand, and it matters because the biggest single reason people quit kanji in the first month is that the number at the start feels like a verdict rather than a distance.
It is a distance. And the first stretch of it is already behind you.
1. Start with shapes, not lists. Every kanji in Kanjijo carries an exclusive mnemonic - a blade over a heart for 忍, an empty hand for 空手 - written as an image you can picture rather than a definition you have to hold.
2. Let the characters compound. Each character links to every vocabulary word that contains it, so 道 delivers 北海道, 道路, 歩道 and 水道 without a separate study session, and every word ships with example sentences in furigana with audio.
3. Never lose one again. The SRS engine schedules each character for the moment before it fades, and the home screen, lock screen and interactive test widgets put reviews on the screen you already look at all day - no session, no willpower.
4. Read the real world immediately. The OCR scanner turns any sign, menu, box or comment into readings and meanings, and anything you scan becomes a review card.
Then the whole path is there when you want it: full N5–N1 kanji, vocabulary and grammar banks, JLPT reading and JLPT listening practice, mock JLPT tests, and conversation, shadowing and dictation tracks for the day 先輩 stops being a word you read and becomes a person you talk to.
- Exclusive kanji & vocab mnemonics
- Character → vocabulary links
- SRS spaced repetition
- Home & lock screen widgets
- Interactive test widget
- OCR scanner
- Full N5–N1 grammar bank
- JLPT reading practice
- JLPT listening practice
- Mock JLPT tests
- Conversation & shadowing
- Dictation training
Quick reference
- 忍者
- 忍 (endure - a blade 刃 over a heart 心) + 者 (person).
- 空手
- Empty hand. Originally written 唐手, Tang-dynasty hand.
- 津波
- Harbour wave - 津 harbour + 波 wave.
- 絵文字
- Picture character. Unrelated to the English word “emotion”.
- 人力車
- Person + power + vehicle. English shortened it to rickshaw.
- 大君 / 班長 / 少し
- The sources of tycoon, honcho and skosh.
- 道 / 者 / 空 / 手 / 気 / 人 / 力 / 車 / 和 / 画 / 屋 / 酒
- The recurring characters inside those words - each one unlocks four to six everyday words immediately.
- False friends
- アニメ = all animation · 布団 = bedding · 火鉢 = brazier · 酒 = alcohol generally · 先輩 = seniority, not romance.
Related Reading on Kanjijo
Frequently Asked Questions
Karate is written 空手 and literally means empty hand - 空 (から, empty or sky) plus 手 (て, hand), meaning fighting without a weapon. The name has a history: the art was originally written 唐手, also read karate, where 唐 refers to Tang-dynasty China, marking its Chinese roots. During the early twentieth century the first character was replaced with the identically-read 空, which both removed the foreign reference and gave the art a more philosophical name. The 手 in 空手 is the same 手 as in 手紙 (letter) and 上手 (skilled).
No - the resemblance is a coincidence. Emoji is 絵文字: 絵 (え) means picture and 文字 (もじ) means written character, so the word means picture-character. It has nothing etymologically to do with emotion or with emoticon, which is an English blend of emotion and icon. The 文字 half is worth owning on its own, because it appears constantly: 文字化け is garbled text, 大文字 and 小文字 are upper and lower case, and 文 alone runs through 文章 (writing), 作文 (composition) and 文化 (culture).
Not quite. 酒 (さけ, or お酒 osake) is the general Japanese word for alcohol of any kind - beer, wine and whisky are all 酒. The specific drink English calls sake is 日本酒 (にほんしゅ, nihonshu), literally Japanese alcohol. Ordering さけ in a bar is therefore ambiguous in a way the English word is not. The character 酒 also appears in 居酒屋 (izakaya, a stay-and-drink shop) and 酒屋 (a liquor store), so learning it pays for itself quickly.
Several. Anime in Japan (アニメ) means all animation including foreign cartoons, not a Japanese style. A futon 布団 in Japan is the bedding set laid out on tatami, not a folding sofa-bed. Hibachi 火鉢 is a traditional charcoal brazier for heating a room - the grill English calls hibachi is teppanyaki 鉄板焼き. Otaku お宅 literally means your house and was a formal way of saying you before it came to describe obsessive fans. Senpai 先輩 carries no romantic sense at all; it simply marks someone who joined before you did.
They are an unusually good starting point, because the hardest part of a new kanji is attaching meaning to a shape, and with these words the meaning is already in your head. You know what a ninja is, so 忍者 costs you only the shapes. The bigger payoff is that these words share characters - 道 appears in judo, kendo, aikido and dojo; 者 appears in ninja and geisha - so forty words collapse into roughly twenty-four characters, each of which then unlocks dozens of ordinary words. Learning kanji by shared components rather than as isolated pictures is exactly how Kanjijo is structured, with every character linked to every word that contains it.
You are further in than you thought
Kanjijo picks up exactly here: exclusive mnemonics for every kanji and every vocabulary word, characters linked to every word that contains them, an SRS engine that reviews each one at the moment before you forget, and home, lock screen and interactive test widgets that keep them in front of you all day. Plus an OCR scanner for the real world, the full N5–N1 kanji, vocabulary and grammar banks, JLPT reading and listening practice, mock tests, conversation, shadowing and dictation. Free on iPhone.
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