2,200 kanji,remembered —story by story.
All 2,200 frames. Free. The book, frame for frame.
Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, as a progression — Learn, Review, Quiz, Challenge. You draw each kanji from its keyword, the way the book teaches. Built for adult learners who want a system.
Kanji-do / /kahn-jee-doh/
2,200 frames · 56 lessons · automated spacing.
Seen from the hill above: four flooded plots, the paths between them crossing at the middle — a rice field.
Further on it is still the rice field — though those same crossed furrows, read another way, are the folds of a brain, gray matter parceled into four lobes.
How
Heisig
works.
An imaginative memory.
James Heisig wrote Remembering the Kanji in 1977 — the book that has guided adult learners through the kanji for nearly five decades. His method builds an imaginative memory for each character: a story that connects its primitive elements to its meaning. Every story, every primitive, every progression is already written. The page does the rest.
Stories outlast repetition. Vivid imagery anchors faster than rote symbol-meaning pairs. Once anchored, a kanji stays — and the primitives become reusable building blocks for the next two thousand.
A saying that has crossed ten mouths to reach yours — however fresh it began, it arrives old.
Four
progressive
paths.
Four stages, each earning the next — walk them in order, that's the discipline the name encodes. You draw each kanji from its keyword, the way Heisig prescribes; recognition is practiced too, and available on its own when you want it. The mechanics carry the methodology.
- 01
Learn
Story first. Draw it once from memory.
Heisig's story, primitives, and stroke order — frame by frame — then draw the kanji once from memory and check it against the canonical strokes. After every batch of five, free recall; failed kanji re-queue until you've named each one.
- 02
Review
Scheduled by memory strength.
The scheduled spine: draw each due kanji from its keyword. Each kanji's interval is computed from its memory strength toward a ~90% recall target, and only first-try-correct extends it. A lighter recognition pass — read the glyph, recall the keyword — is there for low-energy days; it never changes your schedule.
- 03
Quiz
Recognize, then produce. The dress rehearsal.
Stage 1: see the kanji, name its meaning. Stage 2: draw — from the keyword — the ones you recognized. Assessment only, so Review keeps the SRS schedule, and completing Quiz unlocks the Challenge.
- 04
Challenge
Three lives. Quiz-and-strength gated. 24-hour cooldown.
Quiz completed and the lesson's kanji settled (average memory strength ≥ ~3 days) to enter. Three lives, no re-queueing, ≥80% to pass. Pass writes SRS; fail records the attempt and locks the path for 24 hours.
Pass it and the lesson closes behind you.
Ten questions,
answered.
The kind of questions a careful reader asks before committing 2,200 kanji of attention.
No — Edition I teaches you to produce and know the meaning of ~2,200 kanji. Readings (on-yomi, kun-yomi) and vocabulary come later, in dedicated editions. Heisig argued (and many learners confirm) that compartmentalizing meanings first makes reading and vocabulary dramatically faster afterwards.