A Radical Way to Learn Kanji

Iron John Academy is a Tokyo-based community of men who are passionate about personal growth through developing hard and soft skills to improve their personal and professional lives.

Though we are a men's skill-sharing group, this class is open to ladies.

What You’ll Learn

• How to study and retain kanji more effectively, without relying on made-up stories or just rote memorization.
• How to break down kanji into their building blocks, or radicals (部首), and understand the difference between meaning radicals (意符) and phonetic radicals (音符).
• How the four types of kanji classification (六書) can deepen your understanding.
• How exploring the origins of kanji (字源) can make their meanings more intuitive.
• How to recognize which tools and methods actually help (and which ones don't), so you can study smarter, not harder.

Class style: Interactive Lecture / Workshop
Bring: Writing utensils, paper
Fee: 2000円

Time and Place

• Thursday, June 26th, 2025, 19:00
• Asagaya Area Residents Center, Room 5
• https://ochk-asagaya-center.jp/top/
• 5 minutes walk from Asagaya station (under the railway)
• 〒166-0001 杉並区阿佐谷北1丁目1番1号, Room 5

Schedule

• 19:00 Doors open
• 19:15 Workshop starts
• 20:30 Questions and networking time
• 21:00 Closing

Details

Learning Japanese kanji can feel like an impossible task, with complex character structures, multiple readings, and subtle layers of meaning. However, you can train your eye and brain to find the order to what at first glance looks like chaos. Once you start noticing the building blocks of kanji, you'll start to see patterns that make their meanings (and, surprisingly, readings) easy to remember.

About the Speaker

Carlos Ramos Fuentes is a Japanese language teacher, historical researcher, and writer. In 2019, he founded [CarlosCoordinator.com](https://carloscoordinator.com/), an online academy offering courses in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Spanish. He is currently pursuing a PhD in Japanese language acquisition at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Bergen, in Norway. Carlos is also the creator of JapanIntern.Net, a platform that connects people with internships in Japan, and Radical, a kanji dictionary app designed to make learning kanji more efficient and accessible.