Kanji 777 Trainer

Learning kanji can feel overwhelming, but here’s something interesting: with just 777 carefully selected kanji, you can understand over 90% of the characters you'll encounter in everyday Japanese. These kanji, originally adopted from mainland Asia over centuries, have woven themselves into the very fabric of the Japanese language, forming the backbone of countless verbs and nouns.

If you aim for native-level proficiency, mastering kanji isn’t optional—it’s essential. But rather than slogging through 2,400 random characters, why not focus on the most common 800 and get the bulk of the language covered? This is the thinking behind the kanji trainer I built. It's designed to help you prioritize your learning intelligently, much like Japanese Complete, which teaches stroke order, meaning, and mnemonic breakdowns. My tool serves a similar purpose, offering a minimalist, straightforward approach to mastering kanji efficiently.

The Design

The page's design is deliberately minimal. Each kanji is presented in large font, demanding attention. The learner must first engage with the character alone before clicking to reveal its meanings, hiragana, and romanji. This design echoes a principle found in modernist art: let the essential object stand, unadorned, in its own right. In this way, the kanji remains the focal point until the learner decides to dig deeper.