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“Our ability to learn new words is directly related to how often we have been exposed to the particular combinations of the sounds which make up the words.”

http://www.victoria.ac.nz/home/about/newspubs/news/ViewNews.aspx?id=2455&newslabel=hn

All kanji contain a classifying radical that is a component of the kanji. Often the radical imparts meaning to the kanji – for example the radical for hand 扌 appears in both of the kanji that combine to form the word “grasp” (把持)** and the individual kanji for “throw” (投). Recognizing a kanji’s radical often helps in memorising or deciphering the meaning of the kanji.

Most kanji dictionaries classify kanji according to their radicals. Therefore recognising the radial of an unknown kanji helps with looking it up in a dictionary.

Japanese kanji has 214 different radicals (the Bushu index).

Radicals can appear almost anywhere in a kanji – at the top, on the left, on the right, at the bottom and surrounding (enclosing). For instance:

	This is the for “harbour” with the radical for water highlighted in red.
	Here is the character for “country” with the radical for “mouth, opening, sounding” highlighted in red.
	Here is the character for “big” – it is classified as a radical itself.

 See here for the complete list of the 214 bushu radicals.

** – If you can not see the kanji characters in this post and you are a Windows user you may need to install the Japanese IME. Please see this page for detailed instructions.

Here are links to the scripts:

Japanese
Korean
Chinese
Chinese (Traditional)
Arabic
French
Italian
German
Russian
Spanish
Indonesian

By the end of year nine Japanese students will have learned 1945 kanji as prescribed by the Japanese Ministry of Education (the Jouyou Kanji). There are many many more less commonly used kanji totaling over 5000. ReadWrite Kanji teaches the 1945 prescribed kanji in the order in which that are taught to Japanese students.

Kanji can be written in various styles.
This is the character for “good” written in a number of styles.

Literary (Classical) Arabic is the official language of all Arab countries and is the form of Arabic taught in schools.

What is Hiragana?

Hiragana, which means “rounded” or “easy”, is a phonetic script much like the English alphabet where each character has a unique sound and the characters can be written one after the next to spell out a word. Learning hiragana is the first step in learning how to read and write Japanese – indeed it is the first of the three Japanese scripts that Japanese children learn. Hiragana is used to write the grammatical parts of words or sentences and write Japanese words that do not have a kanji (Chinese-based character).

What is Katakana?

Katakana, like hiragana, is also a phonetic script. Learning katakana is usually the second step in learning how to read and write Japanese. Katakana is used to represent foreign words or sounds – particularly words that have been adopted into the Japanese language (loan words) and foreign names (personal and country names).

In Japanese there is generally more than one pronunciation of a kanji. The ON pronunciation (onyomi) is taken from the Chinese pronunciation while the KUN pronunciation (kunyomi) is derived from the indigenous Japanese pronunciation of the same word/meaning.

ON Pronunciation

Most kanji compounds (words made up of two or more kanji) are built up from the the individual kanji onyomi. For example:

自動車 The onyomi: zi-dou-sha combine to mean car or automobile:

  自- zi meaning self
  動 – dou meaning move
  車 – sha meaning vehicle or cart
 
KUN Pronunciation

When a kanji stands alone and is not part of a compound word the kunyomi pronunciation is usually used. For example:

人 – hito meaning person
鳥 – tori meaning bird
夢 – yumi meaning dream