Illustrated Japanese

Kanji Units

The N5 kanji, taught through words you already say

12 lessons~2 hours12 scenes

Aki stands at the counter in the warmly lit Komorebi House café, holding up her phone as if showing it to someone.

Kanji Units are short, self-contained passes at the characters the N5 exam expects — numbers, prices, days of the week, time, people, places, verbs and the qualities in between. Each unit takes characters you already meet in speech, shows them on the signs and menus of Komorebi House, and points out the radicals that make the next character easier.

Who it's for

—You can read kana but kanji still look like shapes rather than words
—You want the N5 characters in the words you already say, not on flashcards alone
—You are revising for an exam and want the radicals that hold the characters together

Free preview — lesson 1

Kanji Unit 1 — ten numbers you can already say

After this lesson you can

Read the numbers one to ten written in kanji.
Say what a radical is, and point to one inside a character.

Ren has relabelled the shelf edges with numbers, in kanji, on the grounds that it looks more professional. Aki points out that he has put 四 where 六 goes, and that the tea has been in the wrong place for a week.

Aki

Ten characters is a small enough set that being wrong about one of them is entirely your own fault. That is the good news.

Words this lesson teaches

一: one
二: two
三: three
四: four
五: five
六: six
七: seven
八: eight
九: nine
十: ten

What it explains

A radical is a part with a job

Kanji are not drawn stroke by stroke from nothing. They are assembled from a few hundred parts, and about a dozen of those parts do most of the work at this level. A radical usually tells you roughly what a character is about — water, a person, a tree — and sometimes it only tells you where the character sits in a dictionary. Both are useful. Neither is a rule you have to apply; it is a handle to hold the character by.

One character, two readings, and why

一 is read いち when you count and ひと in ひとつ. Both are correct, and the reason is history: Japan already had a word for one when it borrowed the Chinese character, so the character carries the borrowed sound and the native word at once. You do not choose between them — the surrounding word chooses. Learn them as a pair from the start and this stops being strange.

This is the reading half of lesson one.

The interactive version adds the vocabulary check, the pattern noticing step and the spaced review that keeps the words. It's free with an account.