You already know kanji. You can read 水/kanjis/6c34 and 食/kanjis/98df and 行/kanjis/884c. But you open a Japanese sentence and the kanji are separated by squiggly hiragana that rearrange the meaning ...
The ROI of Your First 100 Characters
The JLPT N5 expects roughly 100 kanji. That sounds like a small number against the 2,136character joyo standard. It is not. Corpus data shows these characters p...
The Algorithm That Decides When You Forget
You open your flashcard app. A card appears. You answer. The app decides when to show it again tomorrow, next week, in three months. That scheduling deci...
Not One Chinese Four
Most guides explain on'yomi as "the Chinese reading" and kun'yomi as "the Japanese reading." That framing is not wrong, but it obscures the real structure. On'yomi is not a si...
Kanji Is an Information Technology
The character 鬱/kanjis/9b31 depression encodes in one glyph what English spells out in ten letters and 29 strokes. That is not calligraphic trivia. It is an engin...
The Definitive Kanji Bookshelf, Benchmarked
The Western learner's kanji bookshelf is a graveyard of abandoned Heisig volumes. The Japanese scholar's shelf tells a different story decadeslong refer...
The Empirical Case for Structured Kanji Study
Learning 2,136 joyo kanji is not a willpower problem. It is a scheduling, encoding, and retrieval problem and each of those has been studied under con...
Japan Scores Third in Global Reading With the World's Most Complex Script
Japan scored 516 on PISA 2022 reading third globally despite requiring students to master the most complex writing syste...
Kanji as a Compression Algorithm
The CJK Unified Ideographs block in Unicode encodes 97,680 characters. The KanjiJump decomposition project reduces the 3,500 most important Japanese kanji to just 2...