Data

About

Japanese kanji contain one radical each. For example, you can see the radical of each jōyō kanji (常用漢字) on this Wiki page.
As you can see in the graphs above, here each kanji can contain multiple radicals ('building blocks'). My hypothesis was that visualising kanji like this, i.e. using a force graph that naturally nudges kanji which contain similar building blocks together, might help with kanji memorisation. I also used the classification by concept by Wiki dataset to explore patterns between kanji belonging to similar meaning categories and their constituent parts.
It seems like some interesting clear patterns emerge, such the large number of appearances of the radical 心 ♡ in emotion-revealing kanji. In other cases, it’s harder to see a pattern.

I made the kanji graphs just for myself initially, but it grew into a more proper page. However, I am just a humble student of Japanese, so don’t treat it as a rigorous language resource. The page is also very slow. This is because it's made of thousands of svg shapes. I removed responsiveness for the grade graph to speed it up a bit. I might re-do it a different way if there is interest, but in the meantime, be patient with it. Wait a little bit when you click so that the kanji have time to arrange themselves in the final nice graph form.

Ultimately, this page is hopefully a fun way to explore kanji and use radical patterns to remember kanji more easily. Click around to discover what it does *✧.