Radical: Kanji Dictionary

Most Japanese apps just tell you what a kanji means and ask you to memorize it. Radical teaches you why — and that changes everything.

The thing nobody explains: phonetic radicals
About 80% of kanji are 形声文字 (けいせいもじ、phono-semantic compounds). That means they have two components: one that hints at meaning, and one that predicts the on'yomi reading.

Most learners are probably already aware of meaning radicals, which are mostly just called “radicals”. For example, take 語 (the 語 in 日本語「にほんご」, Japanese language), 話 (話す「はなす」, to speak), 読 (読む「よむ」, to read). They all contain 言, which signals "language/speech”, because it’s the image of a mouth (口) out of which words come out). That's the meaning radical doing its job.

Think about it. You probably know the kanji 五, read ゴ and meaning “five”. And you know the 語 in 日本語. It makes sense that 語 (the suffix for language) has the meaning radicals 言 (to say) and 口 (mouth). But why 五 (five)? How does 語 have to do anything with “five”? This is because 五 is never a meaning radical, but a phonetic radical. Phonetic radicals will give you the on’yomi reading (the reading you use when two kanji are together).

Now look at 五, 語, 悟 and 吾. They all contain 五 as a phonetic radical, and they all share the reading ゴ. Once you learn 五 reads ゴ, you can read a whole cluster of kanji you've never seen before.

Radical was created by Carlos Ramos Fuentes, teacher of Japanese, because no existing app was teaching the real structure of kanji. WaniKani invents mnemonics. Duolingo skips kanji depth entirely. Radical gives you the actual system.

What Radical includes
-A full English-Japanese dictionary with 210,641 words, 6,368 kanji, 246,737 example sentences, and 9,756 JLPT tags, all searchable in English, Japanese, romaji, hiragana, or katakana.
-For every kanji, Radical shows you its meaning radical (what it means) and its phonetic radical (how to read it when it appears next to another kanji). It handles reading exceptions too (the cases where the pattern breaks) with a clear explanation of why.
-A vocabulary list where you save words from the dictionary, track mastery with a 5-star system, and quiz yourself with typing and recall modes.
A kanji list organized by meaning radical and phonetic radicalso you can see the structural patterns that connect them and do quizzes to raise their mastery to 5 stars.
-Courses: start with Understanding Radicals, a free mini-course that explains the whole system with a certificate on completion. Then move into the JLPT N5 Kanji course, which covers every kanji you need for N5 with structured lessons, reading exception explanations, and a mastery-to-certificate progression.
-A streak, study stats, and JLPT-level progress tracking to keep you moving.

Who Radical is for
You've been studying Japanese for a while but kanji still feels like memorizing random symbols. You've tried Duolingo or Anki but stalled. You want to understand kanji, not just collect flashcard streaks. You're working toward JLPT N5 or higher and want a method that scales.

Data sources: JMDict, KANJIDIC, Tatoeba, Ishizawa-sensei's phonetic radical research, and the author's own academic work on kanji acquisition through phonetic radicals.

Made by Carlos Ramos Fuentes, teacher of Japanese at CarlosCoordinator.com.
If you're looking for live Japanese classes, from fluency development to JLPT N1, I'm here to help: https://zcal.co/carloscoordinator/japanese. You can also find your dream internship in Japan at JapanIntern.Net.

My new JLPT N1/N2 Prep Course is out! Check it out and get the first class for free at https://carloscoordinator.com/course.

At my language academy, we also teach Spanish, English & Chinese. If you'd like to book a free trial class, you may set it up here: https://zcal.co/carloscoordinator/discoverycall