KANJI-ZUKAN

13,000 kanji. Stroke order, readings, writing—learn them all here.

I'm the developer of this app, and I'm Japanese. And I have an American friend who's learning Japanese. He always studied kanji with a book in hand. He liked it—you can learn step by step, and it sticks. But there was one thing that frustrated him.

"The hardest part is looking up a kanji I don't know."

When I thought about it, it made perfect sense. If you don't know how to read a kanji, you can't look it up in a dictionary. You can't even type it to search online. Faced with a single character whose reading and meaning are both a mystery, his studying would simply grind to a halt—again and again.

When I searched the App Store, I found plenty of well-made kanji dictionaries and study apps for native Japanese speakers. But apps built for people who don't speak Japanese as their first language—ones that let you look up and learn a kanji you can't even read—were almost nowhere to be found. The number of Japanese learners keeps growing, so why was that? The question stuck with me.

"Then I'll just build the app that learners like him would actually want to use." That's how KANJI-ZUKAN was born.

You don't need to know the reading. Trace it by hand, search by meaning (in English), or look it up by reading—there's an entry point for everyone. You can also browse kanji by level, from N5 to N1, so you can focus on exactly the characters you need right now. Each entry carefully includes readings, meanings, example sentences, and stroke order, and you can even hear the example sentences read aloud.

And so that looking things up isn't where it ends: add the kanji you want to remember to your review list, and they'll come back to you right around the time you start to forget them. Reading and writing are tracked separately, so you can close the gaps one by one—the ones you can write but can't read, and the ones you can read but can't write. The app's interface supports both English and Japanese, so you can even set it to Japanese on purpose, as part of your study.

So that the effort of looking things up never stops your learning—KANJI-ZUKAN aims to turn kanji from a wall into a doorway.

P.S. That friend still uses this app today. When he told me, "I can handwrite a kanji I can't read and instantly see what it means—now my book studying never gets interrupted," I knew it had been worth building. I hope it can give your Japanese studies a little push, too.