Junko, a free stroke order app: see how to write kanji and kana stroke by stroke, with stroke counts, as a calligrapher brushes each character in a 3D tea room. Handy for Kanji Kentei prep. Type the characters or put them in the URL. No sign-up.
Junko, a free stroke order app: see how to write kanji and kana stroke by stroke, with stroke counts, as a calligrapher brushes each character in a 3D tea room. Handy for Kanji Kentei prep. Type the characters or put them in the URL. No sign-up.
Type the characters whose stroke order you want to check (kanji, kana, alphanumerics; up to 4, so a four-character idiom like 五里霧中 fits) into the strip at the top and confirm. First the stroke-order chart of the first character opens (one cell per stroke, the new stroke in vermilion). Press “Write with the brush” below the chart: it closes and the calligrapher writes that single character stroke by stroke on the sheet; the tip shows the stroke count and the current stroke (“鬱 · 12/29”). The looked-up characters line up as boxes at the top of the screen. Tap a box to clear the sheet and open that character’s chart (one character is written at a time). It never advances on its own: you move between characters only by tapping the boxes, one character at a time. The buttons at the bottom right are Write / Pause and Tune (speed, width, ink). Above them sits a scrub bar that works like a video seek bar: tap to jump straight to any stroke, drag to fast-forward or rewind. Tap the sheet to replay it. You can also append the text to the URL (e.g. https://youtool.jp/junko/鬱 for the stroke order of 鬱).
Same as Google Earth or Google Maps in 3D: drag (one finger) to orbit, right-drag or two-finger slide to pan in any direction, wheel or pinch to zoom. Grabbing the sheet moves the space just the same. Double-tap to return to the front view; tapping the sheet replays the character.
About 6,700 characters: jōyō and jinmeiyō kanji, hiragana, katakana and alphanumerics. Characters without a stroke order skip the animation and are shown as brush calligraphy on the sheet.
Rain falls on the land, gathers where the ground is lowest, becomes a river, and the river reaches the sea. Water never hesitates over its path, because the terrain has already decided it. Stroke order works the same way: top to bottom, left to right, enclose before you fill, the piercing stroke last. Over more than a thousand years of people writing with a brush, only the paths where the brush flows most naturally, most quickly and most beautifully survived. Stroke order is not a list someone made up for you to memorize; it is the path the shape of the character itself demands. That is why, when you write in the correct order, the point where one stroke ends is exactly where the next one begins. Your hand never has to search, so it is fast, and fast without falling apart. Write a character a few times this way and it moves from something your eyes remember to something your hand remembers; the vague “how many strokes was that again?” simply disappears. The shortcut to memorizing kanji is learning to write each one in the correct order as a single flowing motion. Junko’s calligrapher shows you that flow, brush movement and all: the force of a stop, a hook and a sweep, and the pause as the brush travels from one stroke to the next. Watch, trace with a finger, or write along with a pencil. One character at a time, until it feels right.
Yes. On the Kanji Kentei, stroke order and stroke counts are tested at levels 10 through 5, which cover the kanji taught in elementary school: “Which stroke is this?”, “How many strokes in total?”. If you can write the character in your head, you never have to guess. Level 4 and above no longer ask about stroke order directly, but a character you can write in the correct order holds its shape in dictation questions and is far harder to confuse with a look-alike. However many thousands of kanji you have to learn, the foundation is always the correct stroke order. Use it as usual: type the kanji assigned to your level, or the ones you got wrong (up to four at a time), check which stroke is which on the stroke-order chart, press “Write with the brush” to burn the whole motion into your eyes, and rewind with the scrub bar over just the strokes you are unsure of, as often as you like. Your lookups stay on your device, so they become a notebook of your weak characters. To everyone preparing for the Kanji Kentei: on the day you pass, what your hand will remember is not the right answer on a form but the flow of every stroke you wrote hundreds of times. Junko’s brush will stay with you on the paper, again and again, until not a single stroke hesitates.
It generally matches the standard Japanese order (the MEXT stroke order guide). Some characters have more than one accepted order, and a few may be written in a different order here. For the Kanji Kentei or school tests that grade stroke order strictly, double-check with a textbook or a kanji dictionary.
Free, no sign-up. Your lookups, their times and your settings stay on your device, and everything works without an account. You can stop keeping history or clear it in Settings.
Stroke order data: KanjiVG (Copyright © Ulrich Apel) — Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0) KanjiVG website: https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/ License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Brush font: Yuji Syuku (Kinuta Font Factory) — SIL Open Font License 1.1