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