Hello everyone. I’m (still) working for a company that is making an online tool for learning Japanese. I won’t share any names or links because I don’t want to make this post look like an ad
I’m trying to understand people who learn Japanese better. The question I’m interested in now is “Do learners track their kanji knowledge? If so, how?" I hope this community can help me find the answer.
I would be super grateful if you could spare 3 minutes of your time to complete a short survey:
I suppose WK would be the main way for tracking which and how many kanji I know, although it’s not really optimal for me in that regard, for several reasons:
Because of how much I’ve been reading, I can probably recognize about a third of the ~800 kanji I’ve yet to learn with WK. Yet they aren’t properly “studied”. I can merely think of a couple of words including those kanji.
I’ve learned many words using kanji not taught on WK from reading a lot and haven’t been keeping track of that number (mainly because I don’t really see a point in doing that).
It’s hard to tell whether or not you really “know” a kanji, because it’s likely for a word to be out there you don’t know made up of kanji you do know, perhaps even utilizing readings you haven’t learned yet.
I can’t remember all of the kanji I know in handwriting.
Some of the WK kanji I have learned may be a bit blurry in my mind if I haven’t seen them much while reading.
Although, to be fair, I don’t think it’s possible to create a tool that could accurately keep track of one’s kanji knowledge, nor would it be worth the effort to attempt to create one. The way I see it, it’s mainly to track your progress.
Back when I was doing WK I also felt that my knowledge wasn’t tracked properly, but because it said I knew kanji I would never be able to recognize in the wild. The vast majority was like this.
I answered, but indeed it can be difficult to gauge… Because there are depth in everything, not only breadth.
For example, do I know less commonly used readings of lower level Kanji? How many vocabularies can I recognize / build with those? What about telling apart the Kanji, especially out of context? (Think a big few Kanji, on a screen.) What about alternate forms of Kanji? 略字? Handwriting?
The only thing I don’t count for now, is writing them out myself.
The main way of tracking would be self-evaluation, of whether I felt something is missing and should lookup, but that is also questionable.
Anki would be another good way, but flashcards can be difficult to accurately design.
Tracking is an interesting one because I think that students start off caring a lot about it – fixating on the jouyou kanji set or counting kanji you “know”. But I think the longer you study the more you realize it’s a very fuzzy thing to measure, both in what counts as known (recognize it in one word? know readings for it? can write it?) and in there not being a fixed set you need to know (some jouyou kanji are rare and you’ll almost never encounter them; some non-jouyou turn up quite a bit). So you stop thinking in terms of tracking kanji knowledge and transition to thinking more about what you can or can’t practically do (read a novel; write on a computer; handwrite; etc).
Where I’m at now, I mostly care about tracking kanji in the sense that I want to make sure that I’m adding new kanji that I come across to SRS, either Anki if it’s not in WK, or just waiting to learn it in WK. If I forget a kanji after SRS-ing it, then it’s not one that I use enough to need to remember. My philosophy with letting it run through SRS is that it’ll make it a lot easier for me to remember it if/when I do see it again. Currently, I have Anki set to retire cards once the review interval reaches a year or more (at which point, I’ll let the “natural SRS” of reading and listening to Japanese take over), so there will be kanji that I forget. That’s okay.
I guess my own thinking on tracking kanji has changed a bit. When I started out, I cared a lot more about percentages, like being able to read 50% or 75% or whatever of percent of the kanji in any given article or book. Once I reached an estimated 90%, I think I stopped caring about this, because kanji look-ups were uncommon enough they stopped being a real obstacle for reading comprehension. Before that point, though, that percentage number going up represented a concrete gain in reading ease, so I did fixate it on it a bit.
I’ll eventually reach a point where I stop adding kanji to SRS, and I suspect that’ll be the point where I truly stop caring. I can’t really say a concrete number of kanji that I “know,” but I can give a concrete number of kanji that I’ve learned. Those numbers will probably diverge more and more with time.
I read books. If I get royally fucked it means I dont know a lot. If its really easy it means I know what I know. xD
Sorry, I know a lot of people track these things but I don’t and it makes itself apparent when I use it in real use cases like reading or playing games.