Hello and welcome everyone! For those of you who don't know, I'm a fluent speaker of Japanese. I just have one problem - I can speak Japanese, I can read hiragana, and I can read katakana, but I've always had trouble with kanji. Now, until recently that wasn't a big issue, but then I decided I wanted to start writing in Japanese. But to do that and actually have myself understood, I'm going to have to know kanji (I'll get into the reason in another post if you want to know why).

So, to remedy the situation I came up with this! A blog post I'll make every other day or so where I'll put down some new kanji I learned today, that way I can keep track of it and maybe you'll learn a few things too! I'll keep this up until either I lose interest or I learn all the kanji I need to (there are a little over 2,000 kanji in the jōyō kanji list, so I have my work cut out for me!).


Before I start this, there's a few things I need to make clear. First off, nearly all kanji have at least one Kunyomi and one Onyomi. These are different ways that each kanji can be read, the Kunyomi is the native Japanese reading and the Onyomi is closer to the way it's read in Chinese. Also, some kanji are written with the kanji only taking up part of the word and a hiragana written after it. For readings that go like that, the hiragana that goes afterwards will be put in a parenthesis (for example, the reading of the kanji "光る hikaru" would be written as "ひか(る) hika(ru)"

Without any further ado, here's some of the kanji I learned today!

Kanji: 件
Kunyomi: くだん kudan
Onyomi: けん ken
Meaning: affair, case, matter, item
Example: 事件 jiken (incident/crime), 条件 jouken (condition)
Stroke order:

Kanji: 解
Kunyomi: と(く) to(ku)
Onyomi: かい kai, げ ge
Meaning: Solution, untie
Examples: 謎を解くnazo wo toku (solve a mystery), 解決 kaiketsu (to solve, solution, resolution), 理解 rikai (understand), 誤解 gokai (misunderstanding)
Stroke Order:

Kanji: 決
Kunyomi: き(める) ki(meru)
Onyomi: けつ ketsu
Meaning: to decide, to agree upon
Examples: 決める kimeru (dedice), 決まった kimatta (kimatta), 決断 ketsudan (decision), 解決 kaiketsu (to solve, solution, resolution)
Stroke order:

And that's it for today! I'll post more in a few more days, hope you enjoyed. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them!

Before I finish this off completely though, some credit where credits due. First off, thank you to Jaxsie for providing the inspiration for this format. Check out her Japanese Word of the Day, it's a good way to learn new Japanese words if you're interested in that sort of stuff.

The information for the kanji itself was obtained from the Jisho.org online dictionary. It serves as both a Japanese-English Dictionary and a Kanji dictionary, so it's very useful if you want to learn Japanese.

Also, all of the images for the stroke order was made by the people at Iwate University. I did not make them myself, I just found them on Google Image search.