Call me a masochist, but I noticed I’m able to quickly and better retain kanji when I’m forced to think about how it actually looks when given the English meaning or Japanese reading. I’m experiencing this phenomenon while doing reviews in jpdb.io. When I learned Chinese as a wee kitten at weekend Chinese school, the teacher would dictate the pinyin readings and we kids had to write those characters down. To this day I can still write those first few ~800 characters in my sleep. Everything after that is functional but fuzzy. I feel the current WK SRS method just takes too darn long and I’m tired of making hiragana typos.
Is there any app that can replicate the ancient ways?
I’ve never done WK, but I had an anki deck when I did RTK and I handwrote the answer kanji in a notebook to do my reviews. I know there are a few apps out there that you can handwrite into, but good old analog pen and paper ended up being my favorite solution.
I hand write for practice too sometimes. But I’d like a sound clip for vocab to replicate the nerve wrecking yet satisfying feeling of dishing out the kanji when prompted like having a gun to your head as if your life depended on it. I think it’s that little bit of anxiety that makes the characters stick extra well.
On Anki you can make the front of the card be audio.. but you’d have to source your own audio to make the cards. I’d have to imagine there’s some other apps out there that you could also use, but I usually get annoyed with any other SRS app and inevitably go back to Anki so I wouldn’t know about any of the others
Duolingo now has a Kanji section, and it has you write each character over and over again with your finger on the screen. I’m using it and finding it to be really helpful.
I also write out Kanji characters with pen and paper everyday because it helps A LOT to physically write them out.
Self-Study Quiz script can put the audio in the front, though you need another piece of paper to write, then self check.
You can get a shared Anki deck, then edit it to put audio in the front, putting stroke orders of every Kanji in the back (there are fonts/SVG for this). You can also generate one from WaniKani with Inspector script.
Just like Pinyin, you can also put Kana in front of the Anki card, to try to write. You can make audio optional then.
KaniWani / KameSame way, can also be done in Anki. (EN in front.)
I believe Simias has a nice Kanji handwriting Anki deck that works like _Ji (cloze deletion KanJi).
I used to sync Anki to Android (AnkiDroid) in order to make use of S-pen.
If you summon the right Japanese demon to possess you I’m sure Moloch will provide.
Joking aside, if you have a 3DS the Kanji Kentei games are pretty good and making you write kanji out. You could always just go through all the kanji on wk and use the writing order addon to teach yourself.
If you mean writing on a phone, I use ringotan and akebi for that.
You can choose the kanji to add to your list, so you can follow the waninani learning (or you can add them as you encounter them on the wild).
Ringotan has a set of kanji a bit limited (it doesn’t has 薔 薇 for example), it gives words as hints, checks each stroke as you write (which sometimes is too lenient).
Akebi gives kanji meaning as hints (which sometimes makes it hard), and checks only when you have fully drawn your kanji and pushed the “check” button. It knows also of sinjitai variants if you prefer practicing them)
After several tries I have been able to make a fail, if I diminish the pression at the bend of ム. The program detects it as the pencil leaving the paper, that is, ノinstead of ＜.
Ohhh I forgot about kamesame. Thanks for the reminder! But on second thought I really just want the japanese reading as a prompt. Too many synonyms out there.
I made an anki deck for kanji practice myself, by default it uses the English as a prompt and provides example vocabs and a list of kanji with similar meanings to help with synonyms.
So relieved it syncs to WK.
