漢字勉強 (Kanji Study) with Anki

 

漢字 / かんじ / Kanji 

I'm in the middle of translating 神様のカルテ2 (Kami-sama no Karute 2 / God's Chart 2 / In His Chart 2 / Chart of Love).  Besides that there are a lot of medical terms that I am not familiar with, both in Japanese and English, when I used the vobsub2srt app of Linux, the automated OCR transcription of the sup / idx / sub subtitle files have many mistakes. What's painful even more is that kanji recognition is my weakest in Japanese.

I've announced in the SkewedS Translations site that I have started to translate printed media for me to be forced to be better at reading Japanese, especially kanji recognition.

So I google'd around and found this post in NihongoShark. I've known the Anki app for quite awhile and used the older version when I took JLPT N5 and N4 to review old exam questions. I have to find those decks I've made though. It took me quite awhile to transcribe JLPT 4kyu and 3kyu questions to be made into decks. Can't remember at the moment where I put them. But hopefully, they still exist somewhere in the depths of my current 12+TB hard disk space.

Anyway, I've made some changes in the settings instructed in the post at NihongoShark. Let's face it, today is the first day of the year 2015 in my timezone. The post was made last November 19, 2012. It's relatively outdated now.

Instead of the Anki Deck that was suggested in the tutorial, I used the more up to date and the deck that has more data in it, "Heisigs RTK 6th Edition [Stories, Stroke Diagrams, Readings]". The deck is actually very big compared to most decks (25.36MB) and might take awhile to download compared to other decks, but it's very much worth it. It has tons of information compared to the suggested deck pointed out by NihongoShark. Though I'm wondering why the older deck has 3007 notes, and the new deck has only 2200 notes

I then added a new field, radicals, so that I can also add the radical information of each kanji. I intend to check and input each kanji's radicals at the Denshi Jisho website when I'm on my desktop and JED when I'm on my Nexus 7.

Then I made these changes in the card appearance:

Front template:

<div class="front">
<span class="large japanese">{{kanji}}</span>
<br/>
<span class="small left">{{hint:hint}}</span>
</div>

Back template:

<div class="back">
<span class="large japanese">{{kanji}}</span>
<hr>
<a href="http://kanji.koohii.com/study/?framenum={{frameNoV4}}">
<span>{{keyword}}</span></a>
<br/><br/>
On-Yomi: <span class="japanese">{{onYomi}}</span></br>
Kun-Yomi: <span class="japanese">{{kunYomi}}</span> </br>
Examples: <span class="japanese">{{readingExamples}}</span>
<hr>
<span>{{koohiiStory1}}</span>
<br/><br/>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-<br/><br/>
<span>{{koohiiStory2}}</span>
<br/><br/>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-<br/><br/>
<span>{{heisigStoryV4}}</span>
<br/><br/>
<span class="italic">{{heisigCommentV4}}</span>
<hr/>
Strokes: {{strokeCount}}
<br/>
{{strokeDiagram}}
<br/><br/>
JLPT: {{jlpt}}   
<br/><br/>
Radicals: {{radicals}}
<hr/>
<span>{{words}}</span>
</div>
<!-- available fields
id
frameNoV4
keyword
kanji
constituent
strokeCount
lessonNo
heisigStoryV4
heisigCommentV4
frameNoV6
jouYou
jlpt
onYomi
kunYomi
words
koohiiStory1
koohiiStory2
strokeDiagram
readingExamples
hint
-->

Since I want to be better at reading and recognizing kanji, I made the front of the card to display the kanji itself, and the back of the card the meaning of the kanji along with a lot more information I wanted to my liking.

Also, if you have noticed, compared to the old deck, this new deck already has stories from Reviewing the Kanji / kohii webpage which saves a lot of time. Of course, you can still edit the stories to your liking if the stories provided that are already in the card doesn't work for you.

Another thing is that I changed the new cards / day from 22 to 25. Hopefully, that change won't eat me alive in time haha

To summarize, here's the modifications I did from the NihongoShark post:

• Used a different deck.
• Added a new field in the cards - "radicals"
• Changed the template view, where the front will show the kanji itself, and information at the back card
• Changed the iterations

Hopefully, I get to be more familiar with most kanji in around four months or less. If I pull this off, it would be easier for me to translate printed media and will be able to read Japanese faster.

If you have other suggestions to make kanji memorization faster, or can share your experiences in learning kanji, kindly post in the comments section.