[ファブリス]

Do you know of a web application that lets you study and learn kanji?

EDIT: I'm looking for websites that teach kanji by components, not specifically based on Heisig's method.

Hi Fabrice.

As a teacher of Japanese I`m always on the lookout for new teaching methods/materials and I`ve been looking for a good website for teaching Kanji by components for quite a while.

I still haven`t found one good enough to recommend wholeheartedly, but the most promising one (still in progress), I`ve seen up to now, is Koichi`s "Learning your Kanji Radicals" - available here:

http://www.textfugu.com/kanji/learning-y...ls-part-1/

I haven`t seen any worthwhile web applications per se.


Cheers,

Tom

Disclaimer: All these were probably already posted here.

Here you'll find a list of useful web pages/apps for learning kanji(RevTK included )
http://nihongo-e-na.com/eng/site/tag/Kanji/

I'd recommend checking out http://japaneseclass.jp/ , it seems well made and can be smart.fm alternative.

As for the textfugu mention, I'd much rather recommend kanjidamage to someone wanting to learn kanji(it's both awesome and free).

Kanjidamage is just a modernized, shortened version of an html Kanji dictionary such as Kiki's Kanji Dictionary. It contains a lot less Kanji but includes the authors own kanji mnemonic stories and some usage examples/explanations in English. It doesn`t really reflect a method of studying Kanji by components.

Kiki's Kanji Dictionary contains 3401 kanji, 19,366 compound Kanji words, and a very easy to use browsing feature. It also includes detailed information about the Kanji strokes and radicals. You can find it here:

http://nuthatch.com/kanji/ for information.

or here:

http://nuthatch.com/kanji/demo/frame.html for the framed version of the dictionary.


Cheers,

Tom

[ファブリス]

Thanks, those are interesting links. I remember having seen Kiki before. This is one of the better looking output of the KANJIDIC/JMDICT data. Textfugu looks like textbook meets web 2.0, pretty cool! JapaneseClass looks nice too, with some nifty javascript.. though it seems to do a little bit of everything.

I was wondering if there are websites or desktop apps out there that help memorize kanji with the component approach?

There doesn't seem to be any websites on the Nihongo-e-Na, or that I have come accross before, which go beyond displaying the kanji breakdown. Something like Remembering the Kanji, but without the primitives.

have you seen this?

http://www.skritter.com/

not sure if this is the kind of thing you're looking for or not

edit: review: http://gakuranman.com/skritter-for-writi...se-review/

[ファブリス]

Ah yes, I see they added Japanese now.

Ok I don't think there is a website which I have in mind.

What about a website where users share example sentences?

I suppose it'd have to have some kind of rating, search box, and a way to export selections.

ファブリス Wrote:What about a website where users share example sentences?

Again, probably not exactly what you wanted but worth a share:
http://www.feedmejapanese.com/

[ファブリス]

Ouch. This one looks like what I was trying to do with Trinity couple years ago, only finished and a lot better.

This is the only Heisig-like thing I've seen aside from RevTK: http://fie-conference.org/fie2009/papers/1248.pdf

BTW Did you see this? http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6707

In particular the 3 papers by Lin, Kajita, and Mase (via scholar.google.com).

[ファブリス]

Thank you nestOr.

Still researching the subject.

[ファブリス]

I'm not sure where the "novel approach" is in "LV Approach". Seems to me an implementation of Heisig, where users can choose how to breakdown the primitives.

Now if I was to build an app to do that, I would question the benefits of users using different primitives seeing as there is so much common ground there; versus the benefits of having a common set of learning material. Heisig did the right thing.

I'm not convinced about the effects of "personal visual cognition" either. If someone was already exposed to kanji, then it follows logically that they might recognize a part where another learner won't. Then it can be expected that this person could break down the character in a different way, because they already "see" something in there. Even so, I doubt there is much advantage for learners to create their own variations in primitives. I would think a computer program could compute the most effective primitive sets purely on graphical analysis of the characters, using character/word frequency of use to determine what the best primitives would be.

I don't have anything against the "LV Approach" per se, just I feel that practically asking learners to choose how to breakdown each character is adding unnecessary complexity for the learner. The perceived benefit may instead be due simply to having exposed the learners to the character deconstruction in an interactive way.

PS: Also it is interesting that the paper presents the approach as superseding Heisig's " Component Approach" but it doesn't address the effects of using mnemonics, and especially the naming of those components or component groups (ie. "primitives").

I feel a customized (ie. per user) naming of primitives would be more interesting to study than a customized break down of characters, which can only deviate so far given the limited possibilities of breaking down the characters.

[ファブリス]

There is definitly more work to do. I quote this from a Google search, posted only 8 months ago:

Random internet user Wrote:That sounds like "hocus pocus" to me. Radicals are a way of searching for kanji in a dictionary, not for learning them.

Gold ^^

This might come handy:

http://zkanji.sourceforge.net/

ファブリス Wrote:I'm not sure where the "novel approach" is in "LV Approach". Seems to me an implementation of Heisig, where users can choose how to breakdown the primitives.

Now if I was to build an app to do that, I would question the benefits of users using different primitives seeing as there is so much common ground there; versus the benefits of having a common set of learning material. Heisig did the right thing.

I'm not convinced about the effects of "personal visual cognition" either. If someone was already exposed to kanji, then it follows logically that they might recognize a part where another learner won't. Then it can be expected that this person could break down the character in a different way, because they already "see" something in there. Even so, I doubt there is much advantage for learners to create their own variations in primitives. I would think a computer program could compute the most effective primitive sets purely on graphical analysis of the characters, using character/word frequency of use to determine what the best primitives would be.

I don't have anything against the "LV Approach" per se, just I feel that practically asking learners to choose how to breakdown each character is adding unnecessary complexity for the learner. The perceived benefit may instead be due simply to having exposed the learners to the character deconstruction in an interactive way.

PS: Also it is interesting that the paper presents the approach as superseding Heisig's " Component Approach" but it doesn't address the effects of using mnemonics, and especially the naming of those components or component groups (ie. "primitives").

I feel a customized (ie. per user) naming of primitives would be more interesting to study than a customized break down of characters, which can only deviate so far given the limited possibilities of breaking down the characters.

Yeah I wasn't convinced by that stuff either in terms of 'personal styles' and LV being somehow 'novel' despite referencing Heisig right off the bat, but I do feel the paper lent support to the Heisig method by showing how learners, when given the opportunity to combine visualization in a radical-based approach, group the kanji into progressively larger chunks until they see the kanji as a whole. The variations could be seen more on the level of how people come up with their own stories i.e. mentally frame the primitives differently.

I seem to be noticing a pattern with these papers where they use a rhetoric that plays up the novelty of their own methods even when they're clearly similar to and even inspired by stuff that's already out there. Maybe they want to avoid branding or something? Except a lot of them seem to want to develop their own branded tools. ;p

But yeah, it would be interesting to see if a basic optimum 'story' structure could be found for each kanji based on the limited range of primitive customization.