Kanji keywords are a useful lie

The biggest revelation came to me: these kanji don't have a single meaning associated with them. There is no single keyword that matches them.

In my early studies, I had different sources that gave single keywords to these. I had come from Chinese studies, which, for the most part at the level I was at, had single meanings associated with them. But that wasn't the case with Japanese kanji; they often represent a family of ideas.

My process for choosing keywords

My process for choosing keywords followed a few principles:

1. Keep keywords simple, where possible.
2. Keep keywords open source.
3. Leverage KANJIDIC2 by default.
4. Improve with specific vocabulary from other sources: JMdict, Wiktionary, and dong-chinese.com.
5. Reinforce with Google Translate definitions.

But these don't have a one-to-one conversion to English. In fact, many of these kanji can be used in different forms with other kanji or with hiragana to produce very different words. And so sometimes it's difficult to capture the kanji's concept in a single keyword.

In those cases, I've read through the vocabulary and tried to get a feel for a keyword that represents the vocabulary items I found in JMdict instead of the KANJIDIC2 keyword. I will continue to do this as I go through all the N5–N1 levels of the JLPT that these kanji could fall into.

The old JLPT lists

This is more geared toward the old list of JLPT kanji, since the new JLPT doesn't publish lists anymore. The actual JLPT lists that were published for the tests did not have a keyword. They contained only the kanji, the Japanese readings (kun'yomi), and the Chinese readings (on'yomi).

The goal of adding keywords is to help recognize the kanji and associate it with a meaning that typically will stand across many vocabulary points that use the kanji.

Where the keywords come from

Source audit generated August 23, 2026 across 2,136 kanji. A final keyword can match more than one source, so source counts overlap. “Danki-authored” means the final wording does not have an exact retained source match.

Keywords can be personal

Some of these also have the keyword that I learned in my Chinese studies. For example, 要 has the keyword “want” instead of “need,” as some sources have it. That's one reason I am including dong-chinese.com as a resource: I felt the Chinese fit better, and there was more of a one-to-one meaning.

As I learn more Chinese, I am finding that more characters have multiple uses and meanings than I found in my initial studies at university. Chinese is simpler at the level I'm at, where many characters have a single meaning associated with them, or at least very few. I'm learning that more and more have multiple meanings on the Chinese side as well.

Because of this, I'm still refining this list. And if you want to use different words, please do. Through this process, I have learned how the keywords can become personal, and that's a good thing. This is each our own journey to learning kanji and hanzi.