Abstract-Handwriting is the human way in communicating each other using written media. By the advancement in technology and development of science, there are a lot of changes of technology in terms of communication with computer through handwriting. Therefore, it is needed computer able to receive input in the form of handwriting data and able to recognize the handwriting input. Therefore, this research focuses on handwritten character recognition using Kohonen neural network. The purpose of this research is to find handwriting recognition algorithm which can receive handwriting input and recognize handwritten character directly inputted in computer using Kohonen neural network. This method studies the distribution of a set of patterns without any class information. The basic idea of this technique is understood from how human brain stores images/patterns that have been recognized through eyes, and then able to reveal the images/patterns back. This research has been successful in developing an application to recognize handwritten characters using Kohonen neural network method, and it has been tested. The application is personal computer based and using a canvas as input media. The recognition process consist of 3 stages layer: Input layer, Training Layer and Hidden Layer. The Kohonen neural network method on handwritten character recognition application has good similarity level of character patterns in character mapping process.