This tool reads any Japanese text and reports the stroke count of every kanji it contains, using a built-in lookup table of common JLPT kanji. Stroke count is the number of pen movements a character takes to write by hand — a fixed property used to teach handwriting and to order kanji in dictionaries. Paste a sentence and see each kanji’s count plus a running total.
Why stroke count matters
Stroke count has three main uses in practice:
- Handwriting instruction. Japanese elementary schools teach each kanji in a prescribed stroke order. Knowing the count helps you verify your order and catch strokes you merged or forgot.
- Dictionary lookup. Traditional radical-and-stroke indexes, still common in paper dictionaries and some digital flashcard tools, index kanji first by radical, then by the residual stroke count. If you cannot identify the radical, you look up by total stroke count instead.
- Flashcard and JLPT study. Sorting vocabulary lists by stroke count, from the simpler one-stroke 一 up to the 23-stroke 鑑, gives a rough ordering by writing difficulty that complements reading-level ordering.
How the lookup works
The tool scans your text character by character. For each character it checks whether the code point falls in the CJK Unified Ideographs block and whether it appears in the bundled JLPT table:
- Recognised kanji — shown with its stroke count from the curated table.
- Kana, Latin letters, digits, punctuation — skipped; they do not have brush-stroke counts.
- Kanji outside the table — listed as “unknown” rather than guessed, so you never see a fabricated number.
The totals row sums only recognised kanji, giving you a measure of the overall writing effort for the passage.
What counts as a stroke
A stroke is one continuous movement of the brush or pen. The important rule is that a change of direction within the same lift-free movement is still one stroke. Classic examples:
- 口 (mouth) — 3 strokes, not 4. The top side and right side are drawn as a single downward-then-bottom stroke; you do not lift the pen at the corner.
- 日 (sun) — 4 strokes: left side, inner horizontal, right side + bottom, inner horizontal second.
- 女 (woman) — 3 strokes, including a long diagonal that curves and changes direction.
Beginners consistently over-count characters like 口 and 田 because they see four lines and assume four strokes.
Worked examples
| Text | Per-kanji counts | Total |
|---|---|---|
| 日本語 | 日(4) 本(5) 語(14) | 23 |
| 東京 | 東(8) 京(8) | 16 |
| 学校 | 学(8) 校(10) | 18 |
Note that 語 has 14 strokes because it combines the speech radical 言 (7 strokes) with the right-side component 吾 (7 strokes). Complex compounds like 鑑, 憂, or 護 reach 20+ strokes and are among the hardest to write from memory.
Everything runs locally in your browser. Your text is never uploaded, so the tool is safe for drafts and unpublished writing.