Frequently Asked Questions

Should I start learning Japanese through here?

No. This is an aid very specific for learning the Japanese Kanji.

For learning grammar, I recommend Tae Kim’s guide.
For a dictionary, I recommend jisho.org.
If you want a review tool for memorizing Kanji, maybe try wanikani.

What is the order of Kanjis shown?

The ordering of the Kanji/Radicals is the result of my Graduation Thesis for Computer Engineering.

In short, it models the probability you would want to study each kanji if you were in contact with Japanese media and would sometimes navigate through related kanji.
Being more technical, this ordering is the result of a Personalized PageRank with Non-Homogeneous Restarts. Some more detail is provided in the readme of the thesis, and if you really want to go deep, see Chapter 3 of the .pdf of the thesis.

Some part of the data is badly broken! How do I report it?

Is it really broken? If not, please wait for the possibly-not-so-soon-but-definitely-coming update where I’ll add the possibility for you to customize certain parts of the data to better fit your tastes :)

If you strongly believe something is objectively wrong, please fill out this form.

And please be patient: I’m working on this in my spare time only, for free.

Purple?

My hope is that it is intuitive, but in this site purple means “not a jōyō kanji”. Some of these are Japanese Kanji outside of the official 2,136 list, some are ideograms from Chinese and others are radicals.

Is the font of some characters broken?

Some few radicals (e.g. 𭤨) are so rare that they don’t even exist in Google’s Noto font. Because of that, they were sourced by BabelStone Han, which makes them a bit different from the rest.

What are some of the coming updates?

1. Words. It is much easier to learn Kanji through examples, and I want to add some words for each card.
2. Make-it-yours. I want to allow users to customize the meanings and word examples from any Kanji. Maybe also allow for you to add some mnemonics, and mark favorites at some point.

This is nice! How can I contribute?

For now, just by spreading the word ;)
If this starts taking too much time / energy / money maintaining, I’ll definitely start accepting donations or set up a Patreon at some point, but for now I’m just helping you out as a friend.