About MichiKanji
MichiKanji is a free kanji dictionary and reading practice site for people learning Japanese. This page says who makes it, where everything on it comes from, and how the Japanese gets checked, so you can decide how far to trust it.
Who makes MichiKanji?
I’m Ari Nakos. I’m not Japanese, and I’m not a Japanese teacher. I build and run MichiKanji myself, through The Auspicious Company, a company registered in Massachusetts, United States.
Since I can’t offer credentials, I’ve tried to offer something you can check instead: a plain account of where each part of the site comes from, which parts a program verifies, which parts a person reviews, and what isn’t finished yet. That’s the rest of this page.
Where does the data come from?
- Stroke order diagrams come from KanjiVG, by Ulrich Apel and contributors, under CC BY-SA 3.0.
- Meanings and readings are in the site’s own kanji dataset, which includes entries from KANJIDIC, the property of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group and used under its licence.
- Romaji is not typed in by hand. A program derives it from each kana reading using fixed Hepburn rules, and a test runs it over every reading on the site. It’s there so you can search and sound out a kanji before you can type kana.
- JLPT levels follow widely used community lists, because the JLPT does not publish an official kanji list. Another site may place a few kanji at a different level.
- Example sentences come from the Tatoeba Project, under CC BY 2.0 FR. Each sentence credits the person who contributed it.
- The stories (The Travels of Tan) are original to this site. The scene art is generated with AI image tools. The Japanese is real text laid over the art, so you can select it, search it and have it read aloud.
How is the Japanese checked?
A program checks what a program can. Every kanji in a story has to be on the N5 list. Every quiz question has to have exactly one right answer. Automated checks enforce both before a change can go live.
A person checks the rest. Example sentences are picked from Tatoeba by a script, but one appears on the site only after I have reviewed and approved it. Anything not approved is not shown, which is why many kanji have no example sentences yet. The kana behind each story line’s romaji is written by hand, because a program can’t tell whether 十 is じゅう or とお in a given sentence, and it is reviewed before an episode goes out.
I’m not a native speaker, so when I’m not sure of something I leave it out rather than guess.
What’s finished, and what isn’t?
N5 is the level I’ve taken furthest. It has a full kanji list, a quiz, reviewed example sentences and the weekly story. Every kanji from N4 to N1 has its own page with a stroke order diagram, meanings and readings, but those level lists are still being filled in and the example sentences haven’t reached them yet.
Found a mistake?
Please tell me. Email ari@llanai.com with the kanji and what looks wrong: a reading, a meaning, a missing kanji, a sentence that sounds unnatural. Corrections to the Japanese are the most useful thing you can send.
Where can I follow along?
- A new episode of The Travels of Tan comes out every week, and you can have it emailed to you each Saturday.
- Each episode is also on the MichiKanji YouTube channel.
- There are no accounts. Your progress stays in your own browser, and the privacy policy says exactly what we do collect.