2,200 kanji,remembered —story by story.
All 2,200 frames. Free. The book, frame for frame.
Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, structured as a progression — Learn, Review, Quiz, Challenge. Story-driven, built for adult learners who want a system.
Kanji-do / /kahn-jee-doh/
2,200 frames · 56 lessons · 11 mastery levels.
Another pictograph, this kanji looks like a bird's-eye view of a rice field divided into four plots. Be careful when writing this character to get the order of the strokes correct. You will find that it follows perfectly the principle stated in frame 4.
When used as a primitive element, the meaning of rice field is most common, but now and again it will take the meaning of brains from the fact that it looks a bit like that tangle of gray matter nestled under our skulls.
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.
The primitive elements that compose this character are ten and mouth, but you may find it easier to remember it as a pictograph of a tombstone with a cross on top. Just think back to one of those graveyards you have visited, or better still, used to play in as a child, with old inscriptions on the tombstones. This departure from the primitive elements in favor of a pictograph will take place now and again at these early stages, and almost never after that. So you need not worry about cluttering up your memory with too many character "drawings."
Four
progressive
paths.
Four stages. Each one earns the next — walk them in order, that's the discipline the name encodes. Re-queue logic, first-try-only mastery accounting, two-stage Quiz, mastery-gated Challenge — the mechanics carry the methodology.
- 01
Learn
Story first. Recall at every fifth.
Heisig's story, primitives, and stroke order frame by frame. After every batch of five, free recall — failed kanji re-queue until you have named each one.
- 02
Review
11 mastery levels. 4 hours to 1 year.
Spaced repetition across 11 mastery levels — intervals from four hours to a full year. Only first-try-correct extends the interval; misses shorten it.
- 03
Quiz
Recognize, then produce. First try, both stages.
Stage 1 multiple-choice, Stage 2 free recall on the kanji you recognized. Mastery only credits kanji you got first try on both stages.
- 04
Challenge
Three lives. Mastery gated. 24-hour cooldown.
Lesson must average mastery 3 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.
Nine questions,
answered.
The kind of questions a careful reader asks before committing 2,200 kanji of attention.
No — Edition I builds meaning recognition for ~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.
Begin
with frame 01.
2,200 kanji. The Heisig way.
Edition I, free.