kanjibased

kanjibased is a descriptive term used to characterize content, systems, or approaches that are built around kanji—logographic characters used in written Japanese and in some other East Asian contexts—as the primary basis for representation, analysis, or learning. It is not a formal linguistic category, but a label that appears in discussions of scripts, education, and technology.

In writing systems, kanjibased design prioritizes kanji over syllabaries such as kana, or treats kanji as the core semantic layer with kana providing pronunciation only. In lexicography, kanjibased dictionaries index entries by individual kanji, their radicals, or semantic components, rather than by phonetic spellings alone. In pedagogy, a kanjibased approach emphasizes character recognition, meaning, and stroke-based memorization.

In technology, kanjibased input methods or annotation schemes may assemble text by selecting kanji candidates from radical decompositions or semantic fields. In typography and digital rendering, kanjibased layouts may place emphasis on kanji glyphs, with furigana or romaji as optional annotations to aid pronunciation.

Because kanji are shared among multiple languages and vary in availability across writing systems, the term kanjibased often overlaps with kanji-centric, logographic, or character-based descriptions. Usage varies by field and region, and the term remains informal rather than a standardized category.