Has anyone tried this site: http://www.readthekanji.com? Any comments or thoughts?

Their quiz repetition system seems a bit dubious. I would much rather have their vocab database with JLPT tags and the example sentences and do normal SRS training through Anki.

I'm currently struggling with KO2001. But when I realized it didn't include complete JLPT1 or JLPT2 vocab I got a bit frustrated. Because I think KO2001 (inc. mp3 sentences) has the best learning approach I've tried yet for vocab even though it's a pre-made deck and all. I tried before with a pure JLPT pre-made deck, but that vocab just wouldn't stick.

At 'Read the Kanji' there's an example sentence for every word, which is good and seems similar to the core 2000 or core 6000 at smart.fm. But KO2001 seems more thought through with longer sentences including kanji with different readings and meanings in the same sentence.

Sorry to RevTK if the above mentioned site is a rival or anything, don't mean to offend.

I think several people here use and like the ReadTheKanji site. Myself I really like it. I'm not sure what you mean by the repetition system, but you can pretty much turn it into anki by adjusting the repetition factor really low to learn new words and then really high to review known content. Anki definitely has more knobs and whistles but their system is growing on me.

I used it to get jlpt vocabulary when preparing for JLPT3, but they seem to have since turned into a pay site.

I think readthekanji basically just gets the vocab from freely available jlpt word lists, and the sentences were all from the tanaka corpus, which is also freely available. In fact I think there is an anki plugin which can automatically grab a sentence from the tanaka corpus for a given vocabulary word, but you would probably be better off manually choosing your sentences, if you even need a sentence.

The material on the site is freely available elsewhere for the most part of course. I would say either use the whole site/system or use none at all since as Zarxrax points out you can get the material elsewhere.

They have indeed become a pay site now, although if you had an account created previously then it is grandfathered in as a free account. I'm fine with them being a pay site as long as they continue to improve the site and make it worth it.

The only thing that sucks about it is lack of a built in SRS.

I think the site is amazing. It's done a lot more for my reading ability than any other single tool out there, and from the name, that's what it's supposed to do. I've also learned quite a bit of vocab from it, but at a slower pace than other sites... But then, I'm learning to read it at the same time as learning the definition, so that's okay.

I'm grandfathered into a free account. I've considered writing my own tool to do it better, but I other than the SRS angle, I don't really think I CAN do it better. Well, maybe add custom word lists, but the author has already said he plans to add other features like that later, once the backend is more fleshed-out. So I feel like I'd be wasting my time.

if it had an SRS in there it'd be an insane tool.

mezbup Wrote:if it had an SRS in there it'd be an insane tool.

I would suggest modifications to Anki to make it more like ReadTheKanji, but I don't really like Anki's initial stuff. ReadTK will show you the word several times in short intervals, even if you already know it. I find this helps me tremendously in learning the word initially. Even if I get it right 3 times over 30 minutes, it might just be in short term memory. (My memory works a little oddly.) On the other hand, there are times I learn it the first time permanently, and then that interval is just annoying and pointless.

Does anyone else have these problems? If so, I might think about working out an entirely new SRS algorithm to try to predict which need reinforcing and which don't, and also offer the ability to override it if it predicts wrong.

I also like ReadTK's color-coding for things. At first I thought it was annoying, but later I discovered that words I had down cold when they were red, I had trouble reading them in green font. That makes absolutely no sense at all, but once I had mastered them in both of those colors, they tend to stick a lot better. I may have to see if that means anything.

And of course, the charts are amazing.

Yeah, I loved those things about it when I used it. The problem is with no long term retention mechanism it's... not too useful. If it had the short term (which is wicked) then moved it into long term I could sit on that site for hours!

I think I have an account on there too...

Zarxrax Wrote:I used it to get jlpt vocabulary when preparing for JLPT3, but they seem to have since turned into a pay site.

This is true, but people that created an account before the switch have been given lifetime membership for free. That's kind of cool I think.

I just went back to the site and it seems to have improved. I'll probably start mixing this into my study routine to shake things up a bit. And I can't really argue with free. If you made an account in the past, go check it out again. And if you didn't, you can still get the JLPT4 deck for free.

I was kind of pulling this topic off-topic, so I've started a new topic instead.

wccrawford: Could you not hit the increase strength link below the word instead of answering it to prevent the learned ones from continuing to show up so much?

I agree that it would rock to have a long term study option like Anki available on the site. I'm not sure how they'd implement it though as I wouldn't want the current tool to change for short term learning. For now though you could always just import a JLPT list into anki and use it to retain the material you've already mastered on ReadTheKanji. In fact I already created an Anki deck and sorted the kana only words in the JLPT to the front so I could learn them at the same time. I'll probably un-suspend the kanji ones once I have sufficiently learned them.

chameleoncoder Wrote:wccrawford: Could you not hit the increase strength link below the word instead of answering it to prevent the learned ones from continuing to show up so much?

Yup... But I'd rather have the app be smart about it, instead.

There's no reason they couldn't build it so it moves through it's short term phase and then into the long term one. Message them and tell them to do it. Haha.

He's already been asked to add an SRS to it and like everything else, it's on the 'todo' list. Since it's a closed-source project and all, there's not much help for it.

I had an account from when it was free, so I just gave it another go.

I like the idea a lot (having to type the answer), and it's quite well implemented.
The interface is quite good and it's very responsive.
You can get through reviews very fast.

However for me there are a couple of things stopping me from recommending it:

1) It's way too "repetitive".
Does it really need to ask me again when I've already answered the same question correctly 5 times in the last 3 minutes???
Fair enough for words I get wrong, but the intervals are way too short for questions you get right.

2) If you make a typo, there doesn't seem to be a way to undo.
This just adds to the pain of point 1.

3) A long-term SRS feature would be a big incentive.
As it is now, I think this is okay for learning new vocab, but long term retention may not be helped (depends on your opinion of SRS, some people don't like them).


If you don't know any vocab already it's probably not too bad as is, but if you already know some of the words then the ones you know just "get in the way" too much because of the spacing.

Overall I think it's well done, and if the spacing was better, this could be a very fast way to learn a lot of vocab very quickly.

If you want less repetition, you can lower the Repetition Factor setting in Prefs (and also increase the Cards per round).

As far as showing you the same card so often in such a short period I'm guessing that has to do with how many cards you have in your "known" list. If you just start the site and you go through 50 cards and have your cards per round set to 30 you are almost assuredly going to get duplicates in that round unless all 50 have the same strength rating. As you get through more cards I've noticed the "excessive" repetition mostly goes away.

Hello everyone,

This thread popped up in my inbox under my Google alerts for the site, so I thought I'd take a minute respond to some of the things mentioned in this thread!

I noticed the general reaction to our site in this thread to be "I love the idea of the site, but I wished it had an SRS system." Let me explain our feelings about that, and also why we've changed into a pay site recently.

To tell you the truth, we would totally love to implement an SRS like Anki on the site! So why don't we? Well, it's really just because Anki did it so well already when we started, we figured it would be better to create something that didn't already exist first.

The main goal of our site is to be a simple, great, streamlined tool for reading the kanji. So we initially chose the current implementation because it serves as an awesome complement to really any Japanese study method, as no matter what method you use to learn kanji, in the end, you still need a good way to practice them. And we feel our site really helps support that (and really works in combination with readings books/manga, etc).

Having said that, there is no reason an SRS system couldn't be on the site in the future. I think it's an awesome idea, and I'm always open to discuss possible implementations!
In fact, there are many things we really want to add to the site (custom lists, iphone app, audio perhaps?); and I'd honestly say that because almost all the suggestions we receive are fantastic feature ideas, so much so that it can be really hard to prioritize them! Really, the only thing that was stopping us so far was time; we're a small team so we can only do so much in a day, plus we have separate client work on the side (trust me, we live a very busy day!).

So, to make these features a reality within a reasonable timeframe (i.e. my lifetime), we decided to switch to a pay site (first the lifetime memberships, now a subscription model) to obtain funds to help directly support development. Now we can outsource much of the work in parallel to our development (sentence correcting, deck building for instance), freeing up a lot of our time to focus directly on the site, and new features. In fact, we're finishing up some minor bug fixing now, and will soon start work on a brand new interface for the quiz that is much more intuitive and clearer than the current version.

Anyways, we know our site is definitely not perfect yet, but it's good to know that the only big complaints against our site are just features that don't exist yet, as that can always be remedied!

P.S.
On a side note, as for those who feel that the system repeats too much, you can adjust this in the preferences as fluxcapacitor mentioned above. I really do apologize things like this aren't more clear, but like I mentioned, we're currently working on a much more intuitive interface for the quiz than what's currently there to fix this, along with some how-to guides and an informative screencast to explain these sort of things!

I think it's a wicked and have an account, used to use it a lot a while back. Figured out it was pointless with no longterm memory retention because I could blow through 1000 vocab and a later remember only 50. Reading kanji requires it to be moved into long term memory, else it's a futile exercise.

In short I feel it's unusable without an SRS. Also it's burdensome to have to manually add everything I learn on there into Anki and instead turns the whole operation into a time sink. If the app took care of those needs intelligently it would be phenominal, especially for JLPT study and Yojijukugo + kanken when it gets implemented. A deck for names wouldn't be too bad either.

Anyways keep up the hard work

I definitely agree mezbup that a way to grab the info for long term SRS would be great if only until the site has some sort of long term SRS type ability. For now I simply grabbed a JLPT list from another site and imported it into anki. I'm sure there will be a few differences here and there but fixing those issues is easier than entering the data manually.

My biggest gripe about the site is quickly becoming that it is never up. It's been going down for large periods of time over the last few days.

chameleoncoder Wrote:My biggest gripe about the site is quickly becoming that it is never up. It's been going down for large periods of time over the last few days.

I guess I've been lucky. This is the first time I've caught it down.

joeellis Wrote:On a side note, as for those who feel that the system repeats too much, you can adjust this in the preferences as fluxcapacitor mentioned above.

Thanks. Changing the settings has helped quite a bit.
Sorry, I should have checked for the settings more closely - I'm not sure how I missed them!

Also, my frustration was mostly my own fault. I was trying to use the site to find JLPT3 level words that I didn't know, but turns out I know almost all of them so this wasn't such a smart idea.
Once I move onto level 2 and 1 vocab, I'm sure the repetition will be more helpful.

Keep up the good work. I look forward to seeing your updates.
お疲れ様で～す！