Welcome to Forbidden Kanji
Here we get into the nuts and bolts of how the site works, and how you too can learn the seemingly impossible Japanese writing system. Human brains are funny things. We can walk into a room and forget why we went in there in the first place, we panick to remember the names of people we've already met several times, and we struggle to remember something as simple as where we put our car keys. Yet in memory championships people are able to memorize a randomized deck of cards in under a minute. (For an entertaining read on that topic I recommend the book “Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything” by Joshua Foer.) If you were to run a brain scan on those folks you wouldn't find a massively enlarged memory center. You'd just see a normal brain. They're not freaks - they're just normal people who've mastered the memorization techniques that work well with the human brain’s innate capabilities.
It’s those techniques that we’ll be leveraging here to help you learn two thousand kanji and an obscene amount of vocabulary. (Between both kanji-based vocab and kana-only vocab, we'll easily cover over ten thousand words. But don't be intimidated - here you only learn the words that you want to learn.)
Our Learning Philosophy
The philosophy of Forbidden Kanji is simple: learn what you want to learn, in any order you prefer. Don’t burn precious study time on material you already understand or topics that don’t align with your goals.
This guide is designed for absolute beginners, self-studiers with a solid foundation, and even fluent speakers who have yet to conquer kanji. Whatever your starting point, you’re in control. Skip lessons you’ve already mastered, and when familiar kanji or vocabulary appear in your deck, tap the Remove from deck option to keep your reviews laser-focused.
Kana First, When You Need It
We include Hiragana and Katakana lessons for anyone who hasn’t learned them yet. If you’re new to kana, start there—the vocabulary tied to kanji relies heavily on hiragana. And before you tackle the Kana-only Vocab lessons, make sure both hiragana and katakana feel comfortable as they'll both be used plenty there.
Mastering Counters on Your Schedule
With counters, move at your own pace. One strong recommendation: complete the Basic Numbers set early—ideally before finishing all N5 kanji—because those underpin everything else. The Dates and General Purpose counters are also invaluable at the N5 level. After that, follow your needs. If you’re pairing this site with an in-person class or another app, learn each counter here when it appears there so both resources reinforce one another.
Kana-only Vocab
These lessons cover words written entirely in kana. Some appear in hiragana because they never had kanji—or the kanji is rarely used—while others show up in katakana as imports from languages besides Chinese. In very rare cases you'll see both hiragana and katakana used in the same word because... Japan. If your only goal is to master Kanji, feel free to skip the kana-only vocab lessons. If you want a richer vocabulary, roll them into your lessons. The choice is yours.
Unlocking Kanji-based Vocab
The Kanji-based Vocab section activates as you unlock the kanji that compose each word. We recommend that after a batch of kanji lessons, you don't do any more kanji lessons until all of the kanji-based vocab lessons that you just unlocked have been completed. Learning that vocab is fundamental to knowing how the kanji are used, and those lessons are the best reinforcement for learning the kanji themselves. However, following the "choose your own adventure" philosophy of this site, if you'd like to learn all two thousand kanji first and only then go back and start learning kanji-based vocab... we won't stop you. We'll think you're a madman but we won't interfere with your plan.
Handling Reviews
For Reviews the goal should be to bring them down to zero at least once a day. As you get deeper into your studies, daily review counts can get on the high side. If sessions start to feel overwhelming, dial back new lessons or pause them entirely until the queue shrinks. It’s easy to power through 10, 20, or 30 lessons a day early on, but that pace may become unsustainable once you get deeper into the system and have more reviews pending. Cutting back on lessons doesn’t mean you're slacking off. On the other hand, if speed is your mission and you have the time, you can keep on powering through them.
Your Feedback is Critical
I really hope you have fun with this site, that you learn a lot of Japanese, and that if you're in classes that you blow the other students out of the water when it comes to reading kanji, or Japanese vocabulary in general. If you have any suggestions for how I can make the site even better, smoother, more appealing and especially on how to make it more useful to you, let me know! My goal is to make this the most useful Japanese learning site that has ever existed in the history of the world, so having direct feedback from the users is critical to make sure my time and energy are focused on improving the right things first."