How to Play

The Japanese writing system uses symbols (called Kanji) borrowed from Chinese. Each Kanji is made of components (called Radicals).

In this educational game, you will combine radicals to make Kanji. The radicals are decided by category and sorted by stroke count.

Select radicals from one or more categories and click the SMASH button to see if your radicals can be combined to make a Kanji.

Screenshots

The buttons have a nice "pressed" look and feel when clicked. Scrolling through the Kanji in view mode is a fun way to learn. There's even a cheat mode where you can see all 500 Kanji in the game.

Title Screen

Hey, click that huge play button!

Help Screen

Help is just a click away

Success

Congratulations - You got one!

Failure

Keep trying...

View Mode

You can scroll through all the Kanji you've found

Smash it!

Click the button to see if you can make a Kanji with your selected radicals

Hint System

You can get as many hints as you like

Settings Screen

The usual: Quality, Volume, Saved Progress... wait, is that a CHEAT button?!

Loading Screen

The flash pre-loader lets you know when the game is ready

Development

Here's some background information on the making of Kanji SMASH.

Design

Group Select

Smash Results

The Hint System

The code was written in ActionScript 3 using Adobe Flash CS5. This was my first Flash/Ac3 project, so it was quite exciting! CS5 is sort of an interesting way to develop because it feels more like an art program than an IDE.

Research

Grouping Radicals

Radical Keys

Making sure that each kanji character was composed of the proper radicals was a tedious process that I did manually. It was interesting, though. I realized things about some of the Kanji that I did notice before. New connections were forming in my mind.

The tricky part was deciding what level to break the characters down. Some radicals, when combined, create more complex radicals that can be used to make larger Kanji. I decided to allow both the smashing of complex radicals AND building everything from lowest level.

Layout

The Layout

Careful planning and consideration went into deciding the layout of Kanji SMASH. I wanted arrange the categories in a way that makes sense on many levels. From simple to complex in terms of stroke count as well as grouping by logical order (i.e. the "animal parts" category is next to the "body parts" category, both are adjacent to the "people" category and the "animals" category, and those are followed by "nature" and then "elements").

Once you're in a category, the radicals are arranged in stroke order.

Click Here to Play Kanji SMASH