Kanji-alive

Kanji alive is a free resource for learning to read and write kanji. With few exceptions, this repository includes all of the language data and media files created by the Kanji alive team for our web application (https://app.kanjialive.com) and website. Click on the "Download ZIP" button on the right for the full archive.

The files will primarily be of interest to instructors and students who want to re-use them for teaching and learning purposes. Developers can also make use of our public API (docs) and access the source code for the Kanji alive web application.

This work by Kanji alive is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://kanjialive.com/credits/.

Language Data

CSV files with all of the publically available language data used in Kanji alive. You should reference these files to match the 1235 kanji and 247 japanese radicals supported by Kanji alive to the naming schemes used for their media files.

Due to copyright restrictions, the mnemonic hints shown in the ‘Detail View’ of the Kanji alive web application as well as the organization of kanji into lessons/chapters by textbook publishers are not included.

Examples Audio

Audio files of the pronuciations of 6-12 common compound words for each of the 1235 supported kanji, in the listed order of their Onyomi and Kunyomi pronunciations in Kanji alive. The words are spoken by male and female, native Japanese speakers. The files are available in Opus, AAC, Ogg and MP3 formats (32Khz, mono). 10187 audio files.

Kanji Animations

Kanji stroke order animations hand-written by native Japanese writers on a Wacom Cinqtiq tablet. The videos were captured as 15fps QuickTime movies and converted into 248x248, H.264 encoded MP4 files. 1235 kanji animations. The animations can also be downloaded as a .zip archive in the .webm format. Timing information for each stroke in the kanji animations is also available.

Kanji Strokes

Individual SVG images of each completed stroke in a kanji stroke order animation in ascending stroke order. The SVG files were created from PNG images exported from the kanji stroke order animations. 11929 image files.

Radical Animations

Hand drawn SVG images showing the initial, middle and final images of a three-part animations of each radical illustrating its historical derivation. 730 image files.

Radical Characters

SVG image files of every radical character used in Kanji alive. The images are derived from a Kyokashotai font. 247 image files.

Radical Positions

SVG image icons illustrating the different positions a radical can take in a kanji character. 13 image files.

Radicals Font

A small, custom OTF font with full support for all Japanese radicals and variants (321 characters). EOT, TTF, SVG and WOFF versions can be found in the webfonts sub-directory. Details are provided in the directory on the radicals in the font, their encodings, stroke numbers, meanings, readings and positions.

Kanji Font

A heavily subsetted version (1430 glyphs) of the mplus-1m-light typeface family. It consists of the 1235 kanji used in Kanji alive and minimal punctation glyphs. Available as a webfont in EOT, TTF, WOFF and WOFF2.