How to Make a Kanji Bingo Game Part 2: The Bingo Pieces

I won't lie, this part is time consuming. The most time consuming bit is cutting the kanji into two roots. There are websites with lists and pictures of roots, but because sometimes roots become distorted when they are made part of a new kanji, I recommend doing this in Adobe Photoshop.

All you need to do is to open a Photoshop document and type the kanji you want to cut up into a text box. Then crop out the root that you want. Because of the proximity of the roots in a kanji, you'll probably have to use the eraser tool to mop up some of the little fiddly bits of the other root that got caught up in your cropping field. Save that root, open up a new Photoshop document, type the kanji again, and repeat the whole process again for the other root. So yeah, easy, but takes forever. (Note: many kanji have more than two roots, but if you're using this bingo card pattern, you need to have two pieces. You can put two roots together as one piece, depending on how it is easiest to divide the kanji.)

Once you have all your pieces, it's time for another table! The cells in this table need to be as big as or a little smaller than the cells in your bingo card tables (for the obvious reason that whoever's playing the game is going to put these cells on top of the bingo card). Put each piece in its own cell, making it smaller to fit if you need to. Once all the pieces are in the table, putting your cursor on the table makes a small box appear in one corner, like so:

Right-clicking on this box and scrolling down to "Table Properties" will let you set the preferred height and width of your cells, so you can make each bingo piece the same size.

One more note: some kanji do not divide into a root on the left and one on the right. In some instances, one of the roots is above the other. In this case, you can either make a new table where these roots are horizontal, making sure that this table's height matches the other's width and vice versa. Or you could put all the roots in the same table, but rotate the horizontal roots to vertical so they match the left/right roots. This way, you can use the same bingo card for kanji that divide left and right and kanji that divide above and below. My finished tables ended up looking like this:

Now all that's left to do is print these and cut them out. Then we can print the bingo card and put these pieces together to make real kanji!