Kanji - Lesson 1 - Numbers
To be truly masterful in Japanese you will, of course, need to know some kanji. In our lessons we are going to provide you with a good starting point for further study. There are thousands and thousands of kanji and for each of these kanji there can be multiple meanings and readings but before you despair, let me tell you if you can master 900 to 1,000 kanji, you will be in a good position to do well at reading a Japanese newspaper (which is a considerable achievement!!).

To get you started, we are going to introduce the kanji for numbers 1-10. Although using Roman numerals is commonplace in Japan, we are going to practice the characters for numbers below to get you acquainted with the beautiful and often complicated writing style of kanji.

Below each character you will see a hiragana version to help your pronunciation. Please revisit the hiragana charts to make sure you can read each character.

At times you will see two or even more readings represented in hiragana. We will try to keep these to a minimum, only using the most frequently and common readings, but be aware that there are different ways to say many kanji characters depending on the context of the sentence or the intended meaning.

Surprise!! - One

 

Two

 

Three

 

Four

 

Five

 

Six

Seven

 

Eight

 

Nine

 

Ten

So how did you find your first lesson in writing Kanji?
It isn't as hard as you thought, right?
You should give yourself a pat on the back as you now know 10 new characters!! Next time we'll move onto some slightly more complicated characters in the context of money.

Speaking Japanese is relatively easy when compared to acquiring fluency in writing the language. You may consider the help of the following publications: