Warning: this is a highly addictive way to learn kanji!

Build kanji from their components: choose the correct components from the supplied list, and drag them to the correct places on the grid. Set your preferred difficulty level, and then play in study mode or high score mode. Kanji Builder is very challenging, but it is one of the best ways we have found to cement kanji in your mind!

Jump right in and play, set your preferences, or read the how to guide.

One of our most popular lesson games, Sentence Complete, is now available to play standalone! Sentence Complete is a fun way to test and expand your vocabulary while practicing reading real Japanese sentences.

You are shown a sentence with a few blanks where kanji should be, and you're given a selection of kanji to choose from. Drag the correct kanji over the blanks to complete the sentence. You have five 'lives' - incorrect kanji choices; try to complete as many sentences as you can before you run out of lives!

If you are just getting started, try some simple sentences. Or try something more complex if you've been studying for a while. If you're up for a challenge, try something fiendish! You can set your difficulty range manually any time. Sentence difficulty is based on Kanshudo usefulness level - set your default usefulness preference in your account page.

We are delighted to announce a key new component to the Kanshudo system: a simple and effective way to prioritize your vocabulary studies.

One of the keys to learning vocabulary is to focus on words that are most useful for you. However, this is not easy: if you look up a word, how do you know whether you should learn it or not? You may encounter many more words than you have time to learn - how do you know which ones to study?

Now Kanshudo can give you the answers. Based on the most comprehensive analysis of contemporary Japanese usage undertaken, we have classified all 260,000 words in our system by 'usefulness', and ranked each one with a score of 1-12. For every word with multiple forms, we have determined which form is the most useful, and for every word with multiple readings, we have determined which is most common. The details of our methodology are set out in depth in our comprehensive new guide, How to prioritize Japanese words to study.

Using the usefulness score, we can now help you focus on precisely the words you need to study. Now when you look up words, Kanshudo can automatically help you study flashcards for the most useful words first. You can use Quick Study to identify words at a specific usefulness level that you don't know, and create flashcards with one click. Or you can play Word Match as a fun way to identify words at your level that you don't know. If you prefer to get the big picture, you can view or download some or all of the most useful 10,000 words in Japanese (sorted into batches of 100, prioritized by usefulness) from our 102 new collections: The most useful 10,000 words in Japanese.

However you choose to study, Kanshudo's goal is to make it easy, efficient and fun for you to learn Japanese. Learning the most useful words first will give you a tremendous advantage.

Use Kanshudo to study and track your progress with the Routledge 5000 list! The Routledge frequency list of Japanese words is a set of 5000 of the most commonly used words in Japanese curated by Routledge, a respected British academic publisher.

If you are studying Japanese with any of the Routledge textbooks, you can now use Kanshudo alongside. As with all our kanji and vocab collections, you can quickly create flashcards, use quick study, tag favorites or download the data.

Access the 50 Routledge collections here: Routledge 5000.

We are delighted to introduce our new 'how to' guide to writing Japanese, which introduces you to the standard strokes used to draw all kanji, provides simple rules to help you determine kanji stroke order, and introduces the differences between different styles of writing. It's also available as a PDF! Check out our new guide here: The Kanshudo complete guide to writing Japanese.

Additionally, we have added a great new feature: you can now practice drawing any kanji (as well as hiragana and katakana). Access the new drawing practice tool with one click from any kanji. Our new drawing practice tool lets you overlay your drawing on a reference model, check your stroke counts, and lets you step back and delete strokes you need to fix.

We've also added drawing practice to our popular hiragana and katakana guides, to complement the free flashcards. Now you can practice both writing and recognizing hiragana and katakana.

You can access the drawing practice tool easily in two ways:

Here are some direct links to kanji drawing pages to get you started: 漢 習 道