Chapter 3  KANJI

Learning kanji is not as easy as learning katakana and hiragana. Most modern Japanese written for a general audience uses the kanji from a list called the joyokanji (common use Chinese characters). This list includes almost 2,000 characters, most of which have multiple readings. Altogether, there are a little over 4,000 approved readings for the characters in the joyokanji list. 

Here, some basic kanji are introduced in the following order:

1. Pictographs: characters which look like what they represent

2. Numbers

3. Ideographs: characters that represent an idea

4. Complex Characters (typically pictograph + ideograph)

5. Kanji composed with Radicals
   1. Roof   
   2. Water    
   3. Tree    
   4. Hand    
   5. Road    
   6. Sun    
   7. Rain    
   8. Fire    
   9. Person    
   10. Woman    
   11. Soil    
   12. Metal    
   13. Grass

6. Appendix: Kanji from Step Up Nihongo (SUN) textbooks 1, 2, 3 & 4 (Lessons 3-100)