Japanese Kanji Study Helper

Academic and Personal Project

This is a web app that was inspired by my own troubles with learning to read and write in Japanese. It is built with VueJS and incorporates two APIs which are used to retrieve dictionary entries of words and characters based on the user’s search terms.

Below is an embed of the site itself. You can also visit the full site here.

Context (“But why?”)

Japanese uses a mix of 3 specific writing systems together. Two are phonetic and relatively easy to learn. The notorious third, Kanji, is adapted Chinese characters, with just over 2,000 characters listed as “daily use”. As a side effect of being able to write everything phonetically, I noticed there were a lot of words that I had “learned” but couldn’t actually read or write properly.

For example, you may learn the word for “singer”. Then later you might learn the Kanji character for “song”, and the character for “hand”, but (especially because there are multiple pronunciations for both of these characters) you might not necessarily learn that the word for “singer” is written with those two characters.

This app is, in part, meant to say “Hey look, now you know the kanji needed!”.

Other ways that I hope it will be useful are in helping people notice patterns in how Kanji is used, and as a motivation tool. Seeing my own progress represented tangibly, as something like a count of “known” Kanji, is something that I find incredibly motivating.