Kanji for Emotions: Happy, Sad, Angry & More

Emotion kanji show up constantly once you look for them — in manga dialogue, in song lyrics, in the small talk of daily conversation. Most double as both an adjective ("I am sad") and, with okurigana, a verb ("to feel sad").

Comfort and joy

• 楽しい (tanoshii) — fun, enjoyable. 楽 alone can also mean "comfort" or "ease," as in 楽な仕事 (an easy job).
• 嬉しい (ureshii) — happy, glad — usually about something that just happened, not a general mood.
• 好き (suki) — to like. Grammatically an adjective in Japanese, not a verb, which trips up a lot of learners early on.

Difficult emotions

• 悲しい (kanashii) — sad. The left-hand radical (心, heart) appears in most emotion kanji — worth watching for as you learn more.
• 怒る (okoru) — to get angry, one of the few common emotion words that's a verb by default rather than an adjective.
• 驚く (odoroku) — to be surprised. Notice it's neutral — surprise can be good or bad news in Japanese, same as in English.

Adjective or verb — how to tell

い-adjectives like 楽しい, 嬉しい, 悲しい, and 怖い describe a state directly: "[X] is fun/happy/sad/scary." Verbs like 怒る and 驚く describe the act of the feeling arising: "[X] gets angry" or "[X] becomes surprised." Mixing the two up is one of the most common early mistakes — 私は嬉しいです works, 私は嬉しくなります describes becoming happy, and 私は嬉しいになります does neither correctly.

Because these kanji cluster so tightly around the 心 (heart) radical, once a few of them are solid the rest of the set gets noticeably easier to recognize on sight.