Ringotan - Free app for learning how to WRITE kanji

I’ve spent the last few months writing an app for learning how to write Kanji. I’m making it available for free to early adopters.

Website - Download (Android) - iOS

FAQ
- Is is free to keep?
If you download it now, yes, you keep the full version for free forever. However, I plan to make it paid for non-early-adopters later.

- Does it support Textbooks/Wanikani/etc?
Yes, it supports various textbooks, as well as Wanikani.

- Is there an iOS version?
As of July 2022, yes!

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Oh wow, that looks good! I’ll try it out.

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The app looks good! I tried it and got stuck at 氷. The app did not let me continue even after I have drawn the kanji correctly. I was able to just mark it correct, and then I was able to get to other kanji, but I think that’s a bug.

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Did you not get the little error arrow?

Btw, I am an absolute kanji writing noob, so I had to reset and put my level back to 0 instead of 60. I was a bit confused at the start, so it might be good to indicate that by selecting a certain WK level, you exclude the kanji you’ve learned in Wanikani from the lessons.

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The app crash when I clic on settings, or when I try to trace something.

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I didn’t get any error message.

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I’m not sure why I wrote error, I meant arrow.

For me it’s working perfectly fine btw.

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I’m unable to reproduce this. It may be a legitimate bug, or I may have made the UI confusing. Would you mind posting here with as many details as possible? Particularly, does it happen every time 氷 comes up?

They do show up as reviews, but not all at once, I didn’t want to overwhelm the user right off the bat. My assumption was that the user will know how to draw most of the kanji they know - any that they can’t will be quickly discovered by the SRS algorithm when they come up for review. Or they can be marked as “unknown” to learn them from scratch.

Ahh, that sounds extremely serious! I’ll look into this immediately using the crash report logs from Google Play. I’m tracking the bug here.

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I’ll have to give this a go. I’m at a point where I’ve deferred writing practice to work on more important things, but I’d like to start picking away at my writing ability…

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That’s true. I’m a huge noob though so I still reset. But I might be the exception.

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Looks great.

Trying to sign up for the newsletter but the CAPTCHA submit button is hidden and I can’t press it.

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I’ve sent a report through google.

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Perhaps the problem is that you’re a bot?

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This appears to be a bug with the newsletter service I’m using. I’ve disabled Recaptcha until they fix it. Thanks for the report!

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I also get that error when I click on settings, and when I try to practice, it lets me trace the first kanji then crashes when I’m finished. I’ve also sent an error report through google.

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Looks interesting, signed up for the iOS version

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Just what I needed, downloading right now, thank you!

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How does it work, i.e how does it quiz you on the kanji? Only english keywords? Words, sentences? What does textbook support mean?

Just reading the website, I feel like I still have no idea how it actually works.

This picture seems to have Chinese encoding:

Clicking it also just takes you to the top of the page :man_shrugging: .

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Check out the example images on the app page. Or, if you have an Android, try it out yourself - it’s free!

It determines which kanji to teach, and in what order. The assumption here is that Ringotan is not the only tool someone will use to learn Japanese, so I’ve designed it to work alongside other resources, including Wanikani.

Thanks! I’ve added a bug report here. However, as I’m not a kanji master myself yet, I don’t fully understand the problem. I think I’m using the same encodings as JMDict and KanjiDic, which should be exclusively Japanese. How can you tell it’s Chinese from the screenshot?

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Please try updating to the latest version (v0.13.1). I wasn’t able to reproduce the issue, but thanks to your crash report I think I fixed the problem anyways.

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