KanjiStory is a user-contributed repository of kanji-learning mnemonics. It lets you build, browse and rate stories that put together kanji and their constituting radicals.

The site is still under heavy construction, although you can already browse other users' stories and post your own, once you register.

Still not clear? Perhaps a simple example might help:

• The kanji for east is: 「東」.
• There are a few different ways to break down this compound, but a common way would be to look at it like the mixture of 「木」　(tree) and 「日」 (sun).
• A very intuitive (and quite ubiquitous) "kanji story" for this kanji could be:

  The sun rising over a tree is an easy way to tell where East is.

• Hopefully that's one kanji you will never forget now!

The site is subdivided into two major areas, each of which you can access through the tabs at the top of this page:

read: lets you browse stories that have already been written (by you or by others). You can either have a look at the most recent or best rated ones or look up a specific kanji. Additionally, if you are logged in, you can vote on stories and help make the site more useful to others.

write: is only available after you log-in (if you haven't got an account already, creating a new one is a completely painless 10 second process). It lets you write new stories using a special interface. This interface is meant to be intuitive and easy to understand (you can literally create a story in four or five clicks) while guiding you through the process and ensuring that your story follows the basic ground rules of a "Kanji Story". The result is a fully formatted story that will be visible to all in the read section.

Yes it has (to some extent). In fact, I would venture that the concept of "stories for kanji" is about as old as the concept of kanji itself (indeed, it's pretty much the point of kanji in the first place). Anybody that has ever studied kanji seriously has at least a couple such mnemonic tricks up their sleaves (or the most incredible photographic memory there ever was).

Beside the stories students make on their own, there are a few methods based exclusively on the use of stories. Perhaps most famous among them, is James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, although it is far from the only one or even the first published (the first book about learning Japanese I ever held in my hands, Georges Ōsawa's unexpectedly adequate Four hours to basic Japanese, was written a couple decades before Heisig's and makes great use of such stories in exactly the same way).

During the long and tortuous process of putting this site together, I was introduced to other websites geared at such methods (even though none of them showed up in Google for most searches I could think of). Although some of these sites looked similar to what I was trying to achieve, I decided to go through nonetheless: see below if you really care to know why.

Well, I am not sure if it is (or will ever be) "better", but I can tell you why I felt there was room for yet-another online Kanji Story repositories. Here are some of the requirements I had in mind when I put KanjiStory together (not all the features below are implemented yet, but they are the goal toward which the final release should converge):

• user-contributed and essentially open to anyone: Not just out of sheer　"Power to the People" Wikipedia-style spirit, but more importantly because kanji mnemonics are very culturally-biased, highly contextualised and sometimes downright cryptic to others (just between you and me, I could never get into Heisig's stories and gave up in frustration after one too many story based on a convoluted pun or some US-centric sports reference). The obvious solution is to have many stories per kanji and let readers pick the ones that resonate best with them.
• tightly organised and adaptative: universal stories may not exist, but some stories are certainly better than other. Some stories might be a better fit for some people or other, given certain criteria (funniness, language, etc). Hence the need for a powerful database structure, supporting tags, a voting system and user-based preferences...
• free: free as in beer, free as in speech. All stories on this site are publicly available and the data can be re-used within the terms of the CC BY SA 3.0 license, hopefully benefitting the Japanese-learning community at large. There is not and will never be a mandatory log-in to read the stories published here (and even if there was, the licensing terms would allow any user to pull a copy onto their own freely accessible website, with proper credits).
• simple to use yet nice to look at: a compromise had to be found between ease of inputting new stories (hard to beat a single text comment box with a 'submit' button for that) and overall esthetics of the result. Although the UI is far from finished (and the current graphic layout is all but temporary), I believe this is already a nice step-up from some of the glorified text-file-on-a-screen implementations out there. Further down the road, users should even be able to select their own colour-theme preferences for the entire site in a couple clicks.
• accessible: although the site's heavy use of JavaScript makes this a very controversial claim, I still did my best to ensure that all contents would be semantically structured, easily indexable by search engines and fully readable by any halfway decent browser out there without the need for proprietary plugins such as Flash or ActiveX. It might sound like total nerdy nitpicking to you, but trust me, such things have more importance than you would think.

Of all the kanji stories sites I know of, none comes even close to covering all the points above (and then some). This seemed like a good-enough reason to add my contribution.

First, you will need an account if you haven't got one: click here and fill in the form, your account will be immediately created and you will be logged in.

From this point, when you return to the site, use the login box in the top-right corner.

Registering (and logging in) is required to access most fun parts on the site (writing stories, voting). Unfortunately, this is necessary in order to avoid all sorts of issues tied to spam and/or malicious conduct. Needless to say, if you engage in any naughty behaviours while using this site, your account will be immediately deleted and your IP banned.

You do (under US and international copyright law, copyright in a written work is owned by the creator of the written work and arises as soon as it is fixed in a tangible medium, e.g. this website).

However, by submitting your stories you agree to license them to the public under the terms of the CC BY SA 3.0 license. In essence, this means that all content posted on this site is "free" to be used by anybody, anywhere within certain reasonable limitations (attribution and preservation of the license format). Think of it as a Wikipedia-type approach to content licensing.