memorize more kanji and their readings

I have a great piece of software called jishop. It’s a searchable graphic database of kanji, which can be looked up by meaning, reading (on or kun), or radical. If you know the radical but can’t remember the whole thing, you can search for all kanji that use that radical, and ta-da! You can see all of the kanji that include that particular radical.

It’s shareware, but worth the money to unlock all of the kanji—plus the database updates are free to registered users, which means it will be useful and functional for a long time to come.

I know the kanji and their Japanese readings (or at least one version of the Japanese readings) for mountain, tree, book, ‘japanese language’, river, man, woman, the numbers 1 – 10, horse, water, fire, thousand, ten thousand, yen, and ‘I’. Needless to say, such a random sampling of kanji is only useful in very rare situations…