Why Does Kanji Even Exist? How I Stopped Hating It

Written by Rahul Kumar Singh · Published 26 June 2026

I started learning Japanese as a hobby. No visa plans, no job requirement — I just liked the language and wanted to see how far I could go. Hiragana was fun. Katakana was manageable. And then I met kanji, and my honest, daily reaction for the entire first month was: why does this even exist?

There are two more writing systems that already cover every sound in the language. Why would anyone add thousands of extra characters on top? I remember looking at a beginner textbook page where a single short sentence contained three kanji I didn't know, and feeling like the language had been designed specifically to keep people out.

If that's where you are right now — first month, staring at 漢字 and quietly wondering if you should quit — this article is for you. Because something changed for me, and it wasn't discipline or talent. It was one small realisation.

The Realisation: Kanji Are Pictures of Real Life

Somewhere in my second month, it clicked that kanji aren't random shapes. Most of the early ones are simplified drawings of real things:

• 山yama — mountain. Literally three peaks.
• 川kawa — river. Water flowing in three streams.
• 木ki — tree. A trunk with branches. Two together make 林 (grove); three make 森 (forest).
• 休yasumu — to rest. A person (亻) leaning against a tree (木).
• 明bright. The sun (日) and the moon (月) side by side.

Once I saw this pattern, kanji flipped from being my enemy to being the most interesting part of study sessions. Each new character became a tiny puzzle: what is this a picture of? Even complex kanji are mostly built from a small set of reusable parts (radicals), and those parts usually point at real-world things — water, fire, hand, heart, speech. Kanji stopped feeling like an obstacle course and started feeling like a story about how people once drew their world.

I'm not going to pretend every kanji is a cute picture — plenty are abstract, and some etymologies are messy. But the mindset shift matters: you're not memorising 2,000 random shapes. You're learning maybe 200 building blocks and the logic for combining them.

Mistake #1: I Skipped Stroke Order

Now for the part I'd undo if I could. As a beginner I treated stroke order as optional decoration. I thought: if the final shape looks right, who cares which line I drew first?

It cost me months. Here's what nobody told me clearly enough:

• Wrong stroke order produces wrong-looking kanji. The proportions come out slightly off, and at speed the character falls apart completely. Handwriting that looks fine at beginner speed becomes unreadable the moment you write faster.
• You can't read real handwriting without it. Handwritten and semi-cursive Japanese makes sense only if you know the order the strokes flow in.
• Recognition apps and dictionaries fail on you. Handwriting-input dictionaries expect standard stroke order. Mine kept giving me wrong characters, and I blamed the app.

Later, when I joined a language school here in Nepal, my Japanese teachers drilled stroke order from the very first lesson — and relearning it properly after months of bad habits was far harder than learning it correctly would have been. This frustration is actually why the kanji writing sandbox on this site shows stroke-by-stroke guides: it's the tool I needed in month one.

Mistake #2: I Memorised Characters but Forgot the Meanings

My second mistake: I drilled kanji as isolated flashcards — shape on one side, reading on the other — and a week later the meanings were gone. I could sometimes recognise that I'd seen a character before, but not what it meant. That's the worst of both worlds: effort spent, nothing usable gained.

What fixed it for me:

• Meaning first, readings second. I stopped trying to memorise every reading up front. First I lock in what the character is (using the picture logic above). Readings stick naturally once the meaning is solid.
• Always learn kanji inside real words. 食 on its own is abstract; 食べます (to eat), 食べ物 (food) and 昼食 (lunch) give it three hooks into real life. One kanji plus a few common compounds beats ten isolated kanji every time.
• Spaced review instead of marathon sessions. Reviewing a character the next day, then after three days, then after a week did more for me than any two-hour cramming session ever did.

How I Study Kanji Now

These days I study at a language school with native Japanese teachers, and I prepare for the JLPT alongside classmates on the JFT-Basic track who are heading to Japan for work. My current kanji routine, refined by a lot of failure, looks like this:

1. Meet the character: look at its parts and ask what it's a picture of. Check the meaning.
2. Write it properly five to ten times, following the stroke order guide — slowly. Speed comes later; order comes first.
3. Attach two or three real words that use it, ideally words I already know from vocabulary lists.
4. Review tomorrow, then in three days, then next week. Short and consistent beats long and rare.

If you want to follow the same flow, start with the JLPT N5 kanji chart — all 103 characters with readings, meanings and example words — and practise each one in the writing sandbox with the stroke guide switched on.

If You're Starting Today

The advice I'd give the month-one version of me:

• Don't ask "how do I avoid kanji?" — every learner tries, and it just delays the pain. Ask "how do I make kanji interesting?" instead.
• Learn the common radicals early. They're the alphabet that kanji are actually built from.
• Respect stroke order from day one. It feels slow; it is actually the shortcut.
• Never learn a character without at least one real word attached to it.
• Give it eight weeks of small daily sessions before you judge yourself. The click comes later than you want, but it comes.

Kanji went from the reason I almost quit to the part of Japanese I enjoy most. If a hobbyist from Nepal who once genuinely googled "why does kanji exist" can get there, so can you.

Rahul Kumar Singh

I build and write NihongoDoya. I'm a Japanese learner from Nepal — currently preparing for the JLPT N4 at a language school with native Japanese teachers — and I publish the study system I use myself, free for everyone. More about me · Say hello