How Kanji Detective’s clues work, and why wrong guesses help you learn
Kanji Detective turns every wrong answer into a new clue. Here’s what each clue reveals, how cases are graded, and how to use the daily case to learn kanji.
Most kanji apps treat a wrong answer as a failure. In Kanji Detective, a wrong answer is how the investigation moves forward.
The daily case
Every day there’s one hidden kanji, and it’s the same for every player in the world. The free daily case draws from JLPT N5–N3. Your job is to name the culprit with as few clues as possible.
You question a suspect by typing a kanji, a reading, or an English meaning. If you’re wrong, you get another clue.
What the clues reveal
The clues start broad and get more specific:
- Stroke count. This narrows the field quickly once you know roughly how complex the character is.
- Category, such as Nature & weather or Body.
- A component the kanji contains. This is often the moment it clicks.
- A word it appears in, with the kanji hidden.
- An example sentence with the kanji blanked out.
- Its meaning and its on and kun readings.
- Its stroke order, drawn step by step. This is the last resort.
That order is deliberate. The early clues make you think about how the character is built, from its shape and its parts. The later ones make you think about how it’s used, in words and sentences. Working through them is close to how you’d reason about an unfamiliar kanji in real text.
Graded like homework
Your result is marked the way Japanese teachers mark homework. A hanamaru (花丸) means a brilliant deduction, down to Case unsolved. Fewer clues means a better grade, so there’s a reason to think before you guess.
Then actually learn it
When the case closes, open the case file. It has meanings, readings with romaji, an animated stroke order, example words and real example sentences. Every kanji you crack is filed in your casebook with your grade, so you can come back and revise.
Going further
The daily case is free. Kanji Detective Plus is a one-time purchase that adds:
- a harder cold case every day at N2–N1,
- unlimited training at the JLPT levels you choose, where kanji that stumped you come back more often, and
- the case archive, so you can play any case you missed.
Everything works offline, with no account and no ads.