The Kanshudo Blog
Welcome to the Kanshudo blog! The most recent entries are displayed here; click on any headline to read the full post. Older posts are linked from the bottom of the page.
NEW!
Search the blog using Site search. Enter 'blog' as one of your keywords to restrict your search to blog posts. For example: blog blog kanji blog grammar
You may also be interested in recent additions to our reference library of Japanese grammar and POI (points of interest).

We hope 2023 is off to a good start for you all, and your Japanese studies are progressing well!
Kanshudo's learning community has been growing fantastically, and we're not far off a big milestone in terms of users. So we're thinking of ways to celebrate by helping one or more lucky learners on their path to Japanese mastery! Stay tuned over the next few months for details.
In the meantime, here's a quick roundup of what's new over the last couple of months.
First, we've added nine new Topic Lessons:
Introducing yourself
BEGINNER
Occupations
NEW!
BEGINNER
Tie-in: introducing yourself, countries & occupations
NEW!
BEGINNER
Christmas in Japan
NEW!
UPPER INTERMEDIATE
An introduction to Christmas
NEW!
BEGINNER
Sushi
NEW!
BEGINNER
Sushi Dining
NEW!
BEGINNER
Describing Symptoms
NEW!
INTERMEDIATE
Body Parts
NEW!
INTERMEDIATE
We've added another 9 new grammar points and POIs and updated 12 more. We've also made the Grammar library index much faster and easier to use.
Our partner, Joy o' Kanji, has published 12 new in-depth kanji essays:
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 朽
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 郊
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 畔
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 憩
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 坪
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 勾
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 悠
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 隻
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 媛
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 維
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 妖
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 輩
Additionally, the founder and driving force between Joy o' Kanji, Eve Kushner, was recently interviewed on her personal kanji journey (which is more involved than most, as you can imagine). Check out the podcast episode Going Crazy for Kanji, with Eve Kushner ⇗.
Many of you already know we're steadily improving the audio on Kanshudo. Originally, we relied heavily on browser audio, and we still do for most of the system - with nearly 300,000 words and 160,000 example sentences, prerecorded audio is not practical. However, we are steadily implementing a hybrid solution - human audio for certain items, prerecorded high quality AI-generated audio for most, and browser audio for the rest. As part of this initiative, you'll see the ability to 'report' audio problems appear around the site - you can find an example on the details page for any example sentence. When audio for an item is reported, we'll create a prerecorded version for that specific item - that way we can prioritize improvement where it matters.
Posted: 2022-12-20,
Tags:

It's the most wonderful time of the year ... and this is your chance to set up 2023 as a wonderful year for your Japanese, with 50% off one year of Pro access to Kanshudo!
Kanshudo is the most effective way to learn Japanese — for absolute beginners to seasoned learners. Live in Japan or would like to? Planning a trip or an armchair visit? Want to converse with friends or read Japanese novels? Whatever your goals, Kanshudo is your best option for learning Japanese.
Take advantage of this very special holiday offer now: Give me 50% off!
Kanshudo Pro access gives you unlimited access to:
- Our AI tutor and personalized study sessions
- Unlimited spaced repetition flashcards and learning games
- A comprehensive reference library of Japanese grammar
- Lessons for all levels of learner: Beginner Lessons, Intermediate Lessons, and our growing library of Topic Lessons — including our new lesson Christmas in Japan
- The most comprehensive Japanese dictionaries online
- Multiple study and how-to guides for learning Japanese
- Optional access to over 450 in-depth kanji essays from our partner Joy o' Kanji
Kanshudo is the broadest and most sophisticated online platform for learning Japanese. It will help you master kanji, hiragana, and katakana, along with Japanese grammar and vocabulary, as fast, effectively, and enjoyably as possible! More than 120,000 Japanese learners use Kanshudo with proven results. Act now and get Pro access for less than 10 cents per day!
Take advantage of this very special holiday offer now: Give me 50% off!
If you've been thinking about Pro access for awhile, now is the perfect time! You will not only get the sale discount on your first year, but you will also lock in current pricing. Our operating costs have risen dramatically this year and Pro prices may rise soon, so take advantage of this offer!

As rain and early evenings descend on our HQ in San Francisco, our Japanese team is looking forward to the next Japanese holiday, 文化の日, so we've put together a new Topic Lesson on it to help you join in! Since our last update we've added three new lessons:
わしょく
和食
UPPER INTERMEDIATE
Countries
BEGINNER
ぶんか
文化
のひ
日
NEW!
UPPER INTERMEDIATE
We've added a new game, currently playable in the 和食 Topic Lesson: Sentence Sort! The goal is to drag sentences from a text into the correct order. This is very useful for helping you develop overall comprehension of a passage and its narrative flow.
If you enjoy testing yourself on our collections, you'll enjoy our new countries of the world collection, which includes the Japanese words for every country in the world!
We're steadily improving our grammar library - although it's only six weeks or so since our last update, we've added another 14 new grammar points and POIs and updated 59 more. We are working on a more structured 'path' through the library and some other improvements - stay tuned!
Additionally, our partner Joy o' Kanji has published 11 new in-depth kanji essays:
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 椅
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 嗅
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 拓
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 韻
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 飼
We've added several useful new features this month. First, in category searches (for example Word Search, Kanji Search and Grammar Search), you'll see a new flashcard button at the right of every search result, which will let you add a flashcard to the set of your choice immediately. Of course, you can still assign any flashcard set as your favorites bucket so that the favorites star enables you to add a card to that specific set immediately.
In the details page for a flashcard set, there's a new feature in the 'More actions' list which will let you create a study set with cards you have added to the set today - useful if you want to focus on learning material immediately after you've encountered it.
Finally on the flashcards front, you can now create flashcards for grammar points in the Beginner Lessons.
Happy Japanese studying!

We hope you are enjoying our new Topic Lessons! We're continuing to add new lessons, as well as new games and features to the lessons themselves. Since launch we've already added three new lessons:
Introducing yourself
BEGINNER
The 23 wards of Tokyo
ADVANCED
うみ
海
のひ
日
INTERMEDIATE
If you've tried the Topic Lessons, you'll have seen several new games featured: Image Match, Kanshudo Cloze, and Audio Spell, as well as the new multiple choice quiz format. We're working on several more new games, and we are aiming to have all the games playable independently, with Boost, and with flashcard sets. Stay tuned!
If you have any feedback or suggestions on our games, we'd love to hear from you. Additionally, we're prioritizing new Topic Lessons according to requests, so if there's anything you'd like to see a Topic Lesson on, please let us know.
Since our last update we've added 14 new grammar points and POIs and updated 56 more.
Additionally, our partner Joy o' Kanji has published 11 new in-depth kanji essays:
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 肯
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 瘍
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 飽
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 蹴
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 臆
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 髄
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 嘱
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 殖
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 罵
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 弄
- Joy o' Kanji essay on 痘
Although it's largely 'behind the scenes', we are constantly working on our library of Japanese example sentences, which now contains 156,500 fully parsed, de-conjugated, and translated sentences. Our ultimate goal is to have at least one sentence for every word, conjugation, and even meaning in our dictionary. We're already well on the way - we have examples for the vast majority of the most useful words in Japanese. So far in 2022, we have added 1059 new example sentences, and updated an additional 6583!
We've recently added a new feature in the 'details' display of an example: when an example is linked to a grammar point, we include highlighting of the word(s) relevant to the grammar point. See here for an example (no pun intended!).
Finally, we've added a new Textbook Companion to accompany two of the books in the excellent Practical Kanji series: Practical Kanji 700 I and Practical Kanji 700 II, for intermediate learners. We highly recommend these textbooks, as the readings they include cover a range of topical and useful material in depth.
Happy Japanese studying!
OLDER BLOG POSTS
Kanshudo is your AI Japanese tutor, and your constant companion on the road to mastery of the Japanese language.
To get started learning Japanese, just follow the study recommendations on your Dashboard.
You can use Quick search (accessible using the icon at the top of every page) to look up any Japanese word, kanji or grammar point, as well as to find anything on Kanshudo quickly.
For an overview, take the tour.