How to work out a kanji you don’t know from its parts
Most kanji are built from smaller components that hint at their meaning or reading. Here’s how to read those clues, with examples, so unfamiliar characters stop being a wall.
Sooner or later you’ll hit a kanji you’ve never seen. It’s tempting to treat it as a random picture and reach for a dictionary, but most kanji aren’t random at all. They’re built from a small set of recurring parts, and those parts are clues.
Kanji are made of components
The majority of kanji combine two or more components. Often one gives a hint about the meaning, and another hints at the reading.
Take these, which all share 氵, the “water” component (a squashed form of 水):
- 海 sea
- 池 pond
- 泳 swim
- 洗 wash
You might not know 湖 yet, but seeing 氵 tells you it probably has something to do with water. It means “lake”.
Some other components worth learning early:
- 亻 person: 休 rest, 体 body, 作 make
- 木 tree: 林 grove, 森 forest, 校 school
- 言 words: 話 talk, 語 language, 読 read
- 口 mouth: 呼 call, 味 taste, 鳴 cry (of an animal)
Sound components
The other half of many kanji hints at the on reading. 青 is read sei, and 晴 (clear weather), 清 (pure) and 精 (spirit) are all read sei too. It doesn’t work every time, but when it does, you can often make a decent guess at a word you’ve never seen.
A way to reason about any new kanji
- Count the strokes roughly. It tells you whether you’re looking at something basic or something advanced.
- Spot the components. Which parts do you recognise? Is there a meaning part on the left or top?
- Look at the word it’s in. The kanji next to it narrows the possibilities a lot.
- Read the sentence. Context usually settles it.
Practise it as a game
This is exactly the line of reasoning Kanji Detective asks of you every day. The clues are revealed in roughly that order: stroke count, then a category, then a component the kanji contains, then a word it appears in, then an example sentence. Each wrong guess gives you the next one, so you learn to read the evidence instead of just recognising an answer. The clues guide walks through them in detail.
When the case closes, the case file shows the kanji’s meanings, readings, example words and stroke order, so the parts you noticed get tied to the whole character. The daily case is free and works offline, with no account.