The Kanjimori Method

Here at Kanjimori, we don't want you to just memorize kanji. We want to help you truly understand how kanji are built.

To do this, we'll teach you kanji through building blocks called roots. Roots are kanji or kanji components that can't be broken down into smaller components themselves. In contrast, compound characters are kanji built from these roots. Understanding how kanji are assembled from roots is called kanji composition.

Why learn kanji through composition rather than mnemonics? Simple! Because of scalability. Both methods improve memory by anchoring characters to associated meanings through a process called "associative learning." But while external mnemonics can help you remember an individual character through a story or image, those associations are often specific to that single kanji. This creates a largely 1-mnemonic-to-1-character relationship that becomes harder to maintain as your studies expand.

In contrast, learning kanji through composition and roots creates reusable knowledge. Once you learn a component or root, you'll start to recognize it across hundreds of other kanji that share it. This creates a 1-root-to-many-characters relationship that becomes more valuable as your knowledge grows. Kanji composition is an intrinsic part of how kanji work as a writing system, so developing the ability to recognize components and roots is an important skill at every level of kanji mastery.

In addition to roots and compound characters, we'll also teach you a type of kanji component called component forms. Component forms are different ways a given root or compound character can appear when used inside another kanji. These various forms exist because of differences in writing styles and historical simplification processes called stylization. It's similar to how the letter “a” can appear differently depending on a person's handwriting or the font being used. Rather than teaching the word “ant” written in different fonts as separate words, we teach you to recognize the different forms each letter can take so you can recognize the word regardless of how it's written.

Decoding component forms is one of the main challenges in understanding kanji composition, and it remains an active area of paleographic research today. Here at Kanjimori, we build upon existing kanji composition knowledge by conducting our own research into the origins and development of kanji characters. This allows us to provide a deeply comprehensive system for understanding how kanji relate to one another.

To help visualize how kanji relate to each other, you'll grow your own set of kanji trees. Kanji trees are like family trees for kanji that connect characters through shared components. Your trees start off small but quickly grow branches as you complete more lessons and discover new connections between characters.

Kanji often inherit related meanings or similar pronunciations from the components they contain. Components that contribute to meaning are called semantic components, while components that contribute to pronunciation are called phonetic components. Recognizing these patterns makes learning new kanji much easier. If you recognize a new kanji's components, you can sometimes even infer its meaning or reading before you learn it!