In Japanese language, there is three different kind of characters we can find, that is hiragana, katakana, and kanji. Between the three kind, it is already a well known that kanji has the most of total number of character, complicated, and difficult to remember.

Kanji character is a writing that's absorbed from Chinese characters. Each kanji represents an idea, such as an object, thing or quality. There are more than 50,000 characters, but only 2,136 are considered "common" that's used in everyday life and taught at school.

In writer's humble opinion, there's many reason why kanji is difficult to remember/learn. From many reasons that can be found, I want to tell a few of the reasons that I experienced, those are because;

1). Many kanji character has similar shape with only a slight difference

2). On'yomi and Kun'yomi

3). The way something is pronounced is the same but different character to represent the word

In this part 1, I want to show you a picture of how these kanji whiches have similar shapes can hinder the process of learning for people who's new to learning the Japanese language.

Below I give you examples along with its meaning of similar kanji characters that can make you confused if you still can't recognize the difference.

You can see there's many kanji character that have similar shape, that the difference found is only a slight small line, or the line is a bit more curved. Even only a slight difference from the illusion can make its meaning and how it read changed from what you expected it to be.

If you want to know how to efficiently know the difference, I can only say to be used to see the characters and be aware of many characters that are similar, so you wouldn't be mistaken of how you read/write it from what it supposed to. Quite difficult, right?