Kanji and kana
Practical guides on speaking, grammar, pronunciation, listening, and study planning, written for learners who want to use Japanese in real life.
Kanji and kana · Page 11
Reading Japanese Signs, Notices, and Warnings
The first kanji most people actually need are not on a textbook list. They are on a door, a platform board, or a shelf label, and they have to be read in about two seconds.
13 min readNu, Zu, and Zaru: Literary Negatives You Will Meet
Long before nai existed, Japanese made negatives with nu and zu. Both survive in signs, proverbs, titles and formal writing, and a reader who cannot decode them loses whole sentences.
14 min readClassical Japanese Basics for Modern Readers
Classical Japanese is not a separate language you have to learn twice. A dozen recognisable forms explain most of the short passages a modern learner actually meets.
14 min readReading Vertical Japanese: Tategaki and Older Text
Novels, manga, newspapers and formal letters are still written down the page rather than across it. Once you know how tategaki behaves, a whole shelf of Japanese opens up.
13 min readHow to Read Japanese Handwriting
You learned the printed shapes, then someone handed you a note and none of it looked familiar. Handwritten Japanese follows its own logic, and once you know what a moving hand does to a stroke, most of it becomes readable again.
15 min readKanji Homophones and How to Tell Them Apart
Japanese packs a very large vocabulary into a small set of syllables, so identical-sounding words are everywhere. Writing, pitch and context each solve part of the problem, and speakers have ready-made phrases for the rest.
14 min readKana Games: Learn Hiragana and Katakana by Playing
Kana is the one part of Japanese that a game can teach almost completely. The set is small, every answer is instantly right or wrong, and the only skill that matters is speed.
12 min readKanji Games That Make Characters Stick
A kanji game is very good at one thing: making you meet the same character many times without it feeling like work. The trick is knowing what that repetition builds, and what still needs a pen, a text, and your voice.
15 min readJapanese Stroke Order Rules and Why They Matter
Stroke order looks like a rule invented to make calligraphy teachers happy. It is actually a compression system: eight habits that let you write, search for, and decode thousands of characters you have never met.
11 min readJapanese Kanji Radicals: The Building Blocks Guide
Kanji stop looking like two thousand unrelated pictures the moment you see the parts they are assembled from. Radicals are the small set of pieces that carry meaning, and they are the fastest route into a character you have never met.
12 min readHow to Memorise Kanji with Mnemonics That Stick
Kanji stop looking like two thousand unrelated drawings the moment you see them as a small set of repeating parts, glued together by a story you can rebuild from scratch.
13 min readHow to Look Up a Kanji You Cannot Read
Sooner or later a character appears with no reading attached and nothing around it to guess from. Knowing five routes into it, and which one suits the moment, turns a dead stop into a thirty-second detour.
14 min readPractical guides
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