Hello,

I really love this site, but unfortunately, I live way in the middle of nowhere in Kaizu, Japan. I've been without internet at my home for 2 months, and I have 2 weeks to go until the phone company can come up here to install DSL. I really enjoy studying kanji, but review is very difficult, because I never liked using or making paper flahscards. This site is perfect and works extremelty well, but I can only access it from work.

I work at a middle school, but the network security is extremely strict, almost every site is blocked. Even google and news sites are unaccessible. Fortunately, this site is fine, everything except for one small section, but it makes a big difference. The only part of this site that I can`t access is my failed kanji. I can't review them or correct them. There's no way to undo the ones I've failed, and there's no way to review them! Once I've failed them, they're failed forever, because if I click on the failed stack or a failed kanji, I'm taken to a warning page that access is restricted. I have no idea why this is, and I can't even fathom the criteria for why certain sites are blocked and others aren't.

This is an extrenely inconvenient and frustrating situation. Does anyone else use this site from an unforgiving network?

You can try Ricardo's proxy to see if that works.

Failing that (that was wholly unintentional), you might be forced to use an offline program such as Mnemosyne or Anki if you want to review.

You can also try asking your school to add this site to their white list. I think if you give them a valid reason they may be friendly toward the idea.

Unfortunately the network is controlled by the board of education, and if I asked them to use a website not directly related to my job, they might question why I have so much free time.

Tried the proxy, still won't allow me to view failed kanji. I'll just have to stop marking kanji as failed if I ever want to see them again. Will this cripple my learning or harm my statistics?

esgrove Wrote:if I click on the failed stack or a failed kanji, I'm taken to a warning page that access is restricted.

When you say "click on [] a failed kanji" - do you mean via the 'study' page? What about the 'view all' button on the 'study' page? At least you might be able to see the keywords even if you can't add them back in for review just yet.

If you can get to the list of failed kanji you could just make short lists (say 10 keywords or so) and while you're standing about during lessons (assuming your job is a bit like mine ) you can do some reviewing in your head.

Er...yes, it would most certainly cripple the system: the Leitner system is founded on the concept of you spending more time on what you don't know than what you do know. So, if you fail a card, it goes to first pile and it gets reviewed immediately versus getting sent to the next pile where it doesn't get reviewed for a lengthened period.

Can you not access the study.php* pages? Unless you can "Learn" your failed kanji, this site is virtually useful for you.

esgrove Wrote:Unfortunately the network is controlled by the board of education, and if I asked them to use a website not directly related to my job, they might question why I have so much free time.

Learning Japanese is directly related to your job. If your BoE didn't consider it a valid use of your time, don't you think it would be better to find out and consequently not use the site from work? I asked my BoE to unblock my Slingbox and they did it without even asking why. I just told them I wanted access. Now I can use American TV in my classroom.

dilandau23 Wrote:If your BoE didn't consider it a valid use of your time, don't you think it would be better to find out and consequently not use the site from work?

Hehe...n00b ;-)


Ricardo's proxy is specially designed for mobile devices, but any proxy should theoretically work (as long as the proxy isn't blocked). You can find a bunch at http://proxy.org/
Then again, maybe there's some kind of content filtering going on, and the filter doesn't like something on the study page.

JimmySeal Wrote:Hehe...n00b ;-)

OK fair enough. My point was more that, at least in my case, the BoE likes the ALT to study Japanese between classes and such. Plus, I do get to wow my kids with live TV from the US though so I use Guardster when I need a quick sneak around a filter but if they use Websense most proxies will be tagged "Proxy Avoidance" and be blocked too. There was some program called JAP that may help too I think.

dilandau23 Wrote:I asked my BoE to unblock my Slingbox

whats that?

Here's a little hack that might help you. It probably won't get you into the study page, but it should let you review the failed stack as if it were a normal stack.

Use one of these links:

Review All Failed
Review Failed - Just RTK 1
Review Failed - Just RTK 3

(Only use them if you actually have failed kanji, or these links will show an error.)

From there, I think clicking on the kanji keyword should take you to the study page for that card, but if it was blocked before, it probably still will be.


If you want to make it easier on yourself, you can bookmark those pages or, if you happen to use Firefox and GreaseMonkey, use my script, Kanji Koohii: Review Failed.

Please let me know if that helps. =D

-- Daniel

Also, as for the source of the problem, I suspect it's the little Auto-complete box on the left side of the study page that's killing you, since it loads a whole bunch of keywords and kanji at once.

-- Daniel

dilandau23 Wrote:

JimmySeal Wrote:Hehe...n00b ;-)

OK fair enough. My point was more that, at least in my case, the BoE likes the ALT to study Japanese between classes and such. Plus, I do get to wow my kids with live TV from the US though so I use Guardster when I need a quick sneak around a filter but if they use Websense most proxies will be tagged "Proxy Avoidance" and be blocked too. There was some program called JAP that may help too I think.

I was mainly referring to the old Japanese adage, "Do not ask for permission for that which you are not sure you are allowed to do, for if you get a 'No,' then you really can't do it." Wordy adage. Also, asking for permission forces them to make an "official decision" which could go badly, while they might turn a blind eye if you keep quiet.

But in actuality, I think asking them to unblock the site is a good call, since I doubt that they're going to say "no, you can't use that site."

yorkii Wrote:

dilandau23 Wrote:I asked my BoE to unblock my Slingbox

whats that?

Sorry I missed this till just now The slingbox is basically a major excuse not to study.

JimmySeal Wrote:"Do not ask for permission for that which you are not sure you are allowed to do, for if you get a 'No,' then you really can't do it." Wordy adage

I usually say Japan is "Don't ask, don't tell".