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Kanji Poster

This weekend, I started building a Python script to make a poster using the 2200 kanji included in jōyō kanji list as well as the extra kanji covered in [cached]WaniKani.

Kanji Poster

I'm still experimenting with different ways of ordering and coloring the kanji; for now I've ordered them according to how they appear in Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, and colored them by the log of their frequency in some texts I had.

You can find an example pdf in my github project.


WaniKani on Anki

[cached]WaniKani has long been my favorite way of studying Kanji, but I've always disliked the need to type in every single reading and meaning. At 300 reviews a day that's a lot of typing!

Today I finally had enough. First I considered making a user script for WaniKani to make it work a bit more like Anki (where you don't type the answer at all, you simply indicate how well you knew it with one tap). But then I realized that I might as well just use Anki directly.

I quickly found [cached]wanikanitoanki.com, which is great to …


Learning Chinese

Since I'm soon going to China for vacation, I thought I should at least learn the basics before I arrive. Being familiar with Kanji helps immensely with recognizing Hanzi (the original Chinese characters) - many are identical, even have very similar readings. Only "simplified" Chinese is a bit tricky, the characters don't really resemble Japanese.

Aside from the characters, Chinese has an additional difficulty: tones. The difference between (mother) and (horse) is just the direction of your voice (flat vs fall-rise). But wait, there's more. In addition to tones, Chinese has consonants that are quite hard to distinguish for …


Halfway There

Just recently, I passed an important milestone for my Japanese: 1000 Kanji learned. That's half the way to the official 2000 you supposedly need to read everyday newspapers, as well as other normal texts.

And indeed I have started to read Manga, Naruto and Death Note for now. It is still quite difficult to read, often I don't know what a sentence is supposed to mean, but luckily English translations are readily available on the Internet (I mostly use mangafox).

I've also built some [cached]dynamic grammar flashcards for Anki, though I have yet to use them. Oh the akrasia …


On Learning Languages

I've made an attempt at summarizing everything I know about learning languages into one page, also adding useful resources and books. It's both a personal reference and in the hopes that it will be useful to somebody else - it will certainly be nice to have when making recommendations to friends, be able to point them at a single resource.

Feel free to message me if I left out some essential book or grammar guide, I'll be happy to include them and use them myself!


Language Learning - An Update

It's been quite a while since my last post, two and a half months to be more precise. Back then, I mentioned I was heavily relying on Spaced-Repetition Systems (SRS) for learning and retention.

In the intermediate weeks I found that with increasing competency in a language - after reaching a basic comprehension of at least 5000 words - SRS become less and less effective. At this point, I've completely stopped using Anki for Spanish; instead I'm listening to random podcasts on my way to and from work, as well as watching TV shows in Spanish. My comprehension seems to have gotten …


Japanese Again

It's been a week since I've started using [cached]TextFugu and so far, it's been awesome. I also started using it's sister service [cached]WaniKani but can't report much yet because the spaced repetition algorithm hasn't given me any kanji yet (it takes a few days to start).

I can't read proper Japanese texts yet, but I was delighted when I managed to deceiver the text on the chopsticks during my last visit to a sushi restaurant ("arigatou gozaimasu"). Not much, but it still felt awesome.

So, if you want to learn Japanese, give [cached]TextFugu a try and make …


Learning Japanese

I've been studying Japanese for a few weeks, but so far it was only [cached]Hiragana and [cached]Katakana. Basically Japanese syllabary.

That's the easy part though, actually learning [cached]Kanji (the main part of the Japanese writing system) and of course the vocabulary is the hard part. Now I've evaluated quite a few services, but I'm still not sure which one too use.

  • for learning Hiragana and Katakana, I used [cached]memrise. It's basically a fancy flashcard system for spaced repetition, with the advantage that a lot of courses have already been created and filled with memes. Sadly, it …

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