Even though I don’t particularly care about being able to write Japanese IRL, I’ve been poking at software to help with writing practice (Ringotan, Skritter), and I’m finding that it’s really helpful for recognition retention. It’s much easier to differentiate between similar kanji that only differ by one radical if I’m practicing writing them out.
But I’m also a bit frustrated by both Skritter and Ringotan for different reasons.
Curious if anyone else has found similar success, and what your tooling looks like. Do you just use pen and paper? An Anki writing plugin?
I used to trace them in the air with my finger.
Advantages: very fast and you are not at the mercy of the tooling recognizing the strokes.
The disadvantage: you have to be honest with yourself if you actually got all components and strokes in the right order and direction or not.
I think it’s a good compromise if the goal is to strengthen recognition but not to learn hand-writing.
I use https://kaniwani.com/ , which basically ask you reverse from Wanikani showing you the English words and you have to type in in Japanese (so basically just in Kana).
I write the kanji on paper, only type in the Japanese when I wrote down a kanji, then check. Good thing is, you can mark it as wrong, even when you typed in the correct Japanese, so you can do that, if the kanji you wrote down isn’t correct.
:3 Good thing is also, since it is based on Wanikani, you can practice the kanjis, you learnt here.
I use Ringotan first thing every day and sometimes last thing if I can be bothered. It’s not perfect but the fact that it is linked to wanikani makes it awesome. It doesn’t take a lot of time like kaniwani (I had to give that up temporarily but I will go back) as it is only the kanji. For me writing the kanji is very helpful for remembering. If the keywords could be changed on Ringotan to more closely match wanikani then it would be perfect for me.
I just mean the prompt used in Ringotan from which you produce the kanji. Sometimes they are quite different from what wanikani teaches. In those cases would be good to change them but it’s not such a big deal for me.