Printable Kanji Flashcard Maker

Make Your Own Printable Kanji Flashcards

Kanji reward repetition, and paper cards are the simplest way to get it: a glyph on one side, its meaning and readings on the other, shuffled and sorted into piles until every character is instant. This maker lets you choose exactly which kanji go on the cards — one at a time from a catalog of almost 2,000, or a whole Kanji Chart lesson, one of your own sets, or a full JLPT level — and prints them as double-sided cut-out cards.

How it works

Search the catalog by meaning, kanji, reading or JLPT level and tap each kanji you want, or add a whole group at once: a Kanji Chart lesson, one of your own recall sets, or every kanji at a JLPT level. Choose Letter or A4 paper and six, eight or twelve cards per sheet, then press Print fronts. Put the printed sheets back in the tray and press Print backs: the back of every sheet is mirrored, so printing on the reverse with the same edge at the top puts each meaning directly behind its kanji. A small number in the corner of each card matches front to back if anything slips.

Getting the most out of paper cards

Keep each pile to one lesson or one theme — six to twenty kanji is plenty. Look at the character, say its meaning and one reading out loud, then flip; sort into "knew it" and "not yet" and only the second pile goes round again. Once the glyph-to-meaning direction feels easy, print the same kanji with the meaning on the front and write the character from memory before you turn the card. Tracing each missed kanji by hand fixes stroke order at the same time.

Keep going online

The same kanji live in the Kanji Chart, where every lesson has stroke-order animations and a writing drill, and in the searchable Kanji Library with compounds and example sentences. Build a set of your own on the Kanji Recall page and print it from here, or make vocabulary flashcards for the words those kanji appear in.

Questions