These experiments were carried out to explore the effect of meaningfulness upon learning to read kanji and hiragana moji. The results of a retention test in Experiment I showed that the retention of kanji reading which is meaningful is better than hiragana moji which has no meaning. In Experiment II and III, it was indicated that individual hiragana moji was also learned easier when it was associated with a word (“sa” of “sakura” method). However, it was suggested that young children cannot learn the sound values of each hiragana moji by this method.