[Hard-to-Read Quiz] Single-character difficult kanji — including surprisingly simple ones!

POPS writer/editorKEI
Since discovering music during my school days, I’ve mainly listened to Japanese and Korean pop. I have experience writing articles for sites like Utaten. 2000s J-pop and 2010s K-pop were especially the soundtrack of my youth. With the mindset that “good is good,” I enjoy music across genres. Thanks to past work environments and their influence, I was exposed to lots of classic rock and kayōkyoku (Japanese popular songs), which may have broadened the scope of what I love. At RAG MUSIC, I currently focus on K-pop and J-pop. I strive to edit with a feel for the scene and an eye for hit potential.

Kanji are a classic staple of quizzes.

Even as adults, we rely on familiar kanji in daily life, but we don’t often get the chance to focus on single-character kanji, do we?

So we’ve put together a quiz on how to read these one-character kanji.

You might imagine characters with lots of strokes, but in this article we also include kanji you often see in everyday life and some surprisingly simple ones.

We’ve sprinkled in brief comments about the answers as well.

Use this as a quick break while studying kanji—or as a fun tool to pass the time while you wait!

Difficult Kanji Quiz: Challenging single-character kanji, including some surprisingly simple ones! (11–20)

evil

guilty; having a guilty conscience; feeling guilty
wicked
deceive

See the answer

wicked

It’s used as a word to indicate something is wrong or off the proper path. You might often hear it in song lyrics when listening to music. It’s said to have formed by combining “yokosama,” which described a reclining posture, with the original meaning of “incorrect.”

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