I will say this, however: I cannot count the number of leeches/forgotten terms that both start with “c” that mean very different things, and look similar. this would make me never realize I was wrong.
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I would be happy to pit my retention of meanings against anyone else’s. The act of typing does not affect cognition. That happens elsewhere.
I’m not even sure you’ve been using the site long enough to accurately compare your long term retention to others.
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I already burned this, but just in case.
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I must have missed that study, could you link your sources please?
There’s a thing called the 日本語能力試験, feel free to take it.
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I can’t really speak for the benefits of typing vs, say, Anki, but there is some research which shows physically writing is better for memory retention compared to just typing. Though if you have other studies which show repeatedly typing something is more effective, I would be interested in reading that. Not the guy you were responding to btw.
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Thanks for the feedback, gents. I’ll leave it at that.
For any new users, try it out.
For any new users, be sure to go through this thread and consider it well before trying it out.
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I definitely agree with longform being more effective relative to typing; I was curious to see the evidence that typing doesn’t affect cognition. Hard to comprehend since I’m a working programmer and there’s been a fair amount of typing in my self-education 
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Excellent idea! But why stop at just one language?
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When I’m learning new kanji, I have to write them out in a book. If I don’t, then I won’t remember the fine details, and I will only know the kanji by rough appearance, meaning that I won’t be able to write the kanji, and I’ll be much more prone to getting it confused with a similar looking one. Using shortcuts to remember the meaning just seems like it will lead to way more problems.
For one, despite thinking about what the meaning is before you ‘write’ it, you’re going to be thinking about the word less, as the full word isn’t the key to getting the word right. And two, over time you will be associating the kanji more with the letter since subconsciously, you know that the letter is the key to answering the kanji right, not the word, so you’ll start seeing the letter as more important.
If it works for you and you really don’t experience any issues, then great. But most people’s goal is to learn Japanese well. Not to learn it quickly. You may be a busy person and reviews sure take up a lot of time, but making sure you are able to take your time with learning and fully engaging with the content is incredibly beneficial.
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I really like this! I’ll start searching for this script.
What script?
I think that will level everyone since Select is for switching to multiplayer mode, and I’m pretty sure you have to be an admin to do that.
Also, you’ll need this:
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If you’re not 100% sure of the word, do you purposely type the wrong letter? That’s the only way I can see this working.
For example:
User sees: 又
User thinks: “Is this “after”? “again”? I remember it starts with A, though!”
Do you type “a” because you know that’s the correct answer?
Or do you type “x” to make sure you get it wrong because you don’t actually know it.
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To be fair, he does get a lot wrong (more than I was expecting), so I guess sometimes he forgets which letter of the alphabet the word starts with.
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This is the message I was reacting to: