KANJI BUILD

How kanji relate to each other — semantic, visual, phonetic

Kanji Build is designed to investigate how different kanji relate to each other — semantic, visual and phonetic relationships that help to understand not what individual kanji mean but how the body of kanji has evolved and works together. Learn new kanji organically by how it relates to what you already know and why it is related.

install on phone — open kanjibuild.com in chrome (android) or safari (ios)

Prefer to read first? Read the user guide →

2,800 kanji · 231 phonetic drivers · 382 productive radicals

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Learn 1 kanji, unlock 7

寺 (temple) lives inside seven other kanji — and six of them also inherit its on'yomi . One building block, a whole family revealed.

One kanji, three lenses

氵 + 毎

Visual decomposition

Every kanji broken into its parts, with stroke-by-stroke colour matching. Hover any part to see exactly which strokes belong to it — including positional radical variants like 氵 (water side-form) that link straight to 水's card.

→ 時 持 侍 詩

Phonetic families

When 寺 appears inside a kanji the reading is almost always じ. Kanji Build tracks 231 such phonetic drivers — including five 'ghost' drivers (𢦏, 𠦝, 𠬶, 俞, 龹) that aren't in any modern dictionary but still predict the reading of 17 kanji.

115 kanji

Radical trees

Every productive radical, ranked by how many kanji it grows into. Click 氵 to land on 水's card. Variant glyphs auto-merge into their parent so 水's 'grows into' shows every kanji built from 氵 — 海, 河, 池, 流, 江, 油, 波, 清.

Perfectly complements your existing flashcard apps, books or class by deepening your understanding of what you learn.

one payment

£20

lifetime access

  • ·All 2,800 kanji incl. jinmeiyou — every connection
  • ·Phonetic Atlas (231 drivers, 445 bonds)
  • ·Radical browser with full member lists
  • ·Journal & study mode
  • ·Offline-capable — install as an app on any device

one payment · lifetime access · 14-day refund