Best way to practice writing kanji in the WK learning order?

If anyone is also still looking for this, I ended up changing my approach and solving the whole thing with Anki. (Which I honestly prefer, because Anki is my homebase for languages; I like to input everything I’ve learned into it even if I’m SRS-ing it someplace else so that I can rest easy knowing that if I stop using that other service or it disappears or I forget my password, I’ll still have all the info. It’s a bit more work on the day to day, but in six years, even with multiple breaks up to a year long, I haven’t forgotten a single thing I’ve put that time in with – and if life gets crazy and I have to give languages a break for another few years, I can pick up very nearly where I left off. Also I just like having all my stuff in one place. A passive-feeling but very-effective place.)

Basically, I decided to separate stroke order memorization from practicing balance and actual writing. So for stroke memorization, I just altered the cards I already have. I have two Japanese note types – one for vocab, one for kanji – and several decks for each. I put a new field for stroke order on the kanji note and made it so the EN → kanji card displays that as well as the kanji itself.


dgww

This is such a simple solution-- it was the first thing I thought of, but I thought that it would be too complicated 1) finding the stroke orders, and 2) getting them into anki. (I didn’t wanna go through the whole process of saving, or worse, screencapping pictures from Jisho onto my computer and then uploading them to Anki. That would be a nightmare.) BUT it turns out it’s really easy with the Stroke Order Diagram userscript, already mentioned above. Whenever I learn a new kanji on WK, it’s just right there in the lesson as a saveable .png and I can just copy the image into Anki which takes care of importing it, no manual downloading required. (I mention this because as someone who’s been using computers for most of their life and considers themselves fairly knowledgeable – for a non-CompSci person – the idea of copy-pasting images rather than their URLs is still incredible to wrap my mind around and I frequently forget it’s an option.)

Anyway, whenever I learn a new kanji I’ll just make an anki card and then I can learn the stroke order right from there or review it if I’m not sure. And then for balance I can either just look up the kanji I already know in Kanji Tree (I prefer its drawing UI to Kanji Study), or clone that Anki card type into a new deck where my answers depend on writing the kanji out on paper and seeing how well it matches the diagram. Possibly both.

Thanks all for your suggestions!

EDIT: Based on @ustaalary’s tip that Ankidroid has a drawing feature (and I do all my reviewing on mobile), I’ve further altered the look of my cards to include a practice square so that I can also get that ~balance training~ in.

(If anyone’s interested in doing this, this is the guide I used. The image had to manually go into the media folder before it could be added to the HTML of the cards; it also took some fiddling with the size of the image (in MS Paint :joy::sweat_smile:) 'cause otherwise it was either too small for me to draw anything or so big that when the answer appeared it would push everything up and what I’d drawn would not be in the square anymore. But I got there in the end and I think this is gonna revolutionalize my kanji learning. :smiley: )

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