Remaining Jōyō Kanji Anki Deck

BLUF: Anki deck containing 250 kanji that aren’t in WaniKani.

So you probably already know that WaniKani doesn’t have all the jōyō kanji in it. WaniKani doesn’t (yet?) have these 145 kanji:

曖彙畏萎壱咽韻淫畝謁怨艶旺翁臆虞箇瓦楷諧
骸潰蓋柿嚇顎褐葛釜棺玩毀畿臼嗅僅惧窟薫憬
稽詣桁舷繭錮乞侯勾梗墾痕挫采塞刹蚕嗣恣摯
肢璽餌賜嫉爵儒腫羞愁遵抄硝詔宵拭腎薪裾醒
斥箋腺詮膳繕塑遡踪曽唾堆但綻緻逐嫡衷嘲勅
捗朕逓溺塡妬痘謄頓貪弐捻罵剝斑氾汎頒肘訃
賦附丙蔽貌倣頰勃昧耗冶喩瘍窯沃辣濫吏慄侶
厘楼籠弄麓

I can see why. I don’t find most of these quite as useful (I remember reading once that many of these are only still in the jōyō set because they appear in Japan’s constitution). But I still wanted to learn them, so I made my own Anki deck.

You can download it here: Dropbox - Non-WaniKani Kanji.apkg - Simplify your life (I don’t use Dropbox a lot, so please let me know if these settings didn’t work correctly)

Here’s a typical card:

Pretty simple: kanji, English meanings, readings, and radical breakdown. The first three are all from Jisho. The radical breakdown uses WaniKani names.

Things you might want to know:

  • I made this for myself. I offer no guarantees that it’s perfect, free of mistakes, or useful to anyone else (but I hope it is).
  • This deck also includes the five kanji that got “demoted” to jinmeiyō kanji: 勺匁脹銑錘.
  • This deck also contains several dozen jinmeiyō kanji and a few other kanji as I’ve encountered them. I haven’t added all the jinmeiyō kanji yet; that’s a long-term goal. The tags should tell you which group they belong to; the absence of a tag means they’re “other” kanji.
  • I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but some radicals have Unicode symbols and others don’t (Fun Fact: WaniKani uses a capital L for the “lion” radical). If I couldn’t find a text symbol for a radical, I just wrote the name of the radical.
  • I didn’t write down any mnemonics of any kind. I prefer to improvise them while I study.
  • I’ve been making this for over a year. During that time, I gradually changed how I did the radical breakdowns. In the beginning, I only used radicals that had a blue entry in WaniKani. Now, I do the Heisig RtK thing: I use “sub-kanji” for radicals. I find it easier to make mnemonic devices that way.

In other words…
Old Way:
賦=貝+一+弋+止
levy = shellfish + ground + ceremony + stop
New Way:
賦=貝+武
levy = shellfish + military

The deck contains a mixture of these two breakdowns. I’ll try to homogenize the deck as I notice.

Let me know if this helps you and enjoy!

EDIT: Updated with newest version (again, as of August 7, 2023)!

27 Likes

Thank you for sharing this. Looks really usable!

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Thanks for making this :smile:.

I make a habit of checking “new” cards in all my decks against Jisho the first time I see them because I noticed a few mistakes in a vocab deck I use, and wouldn’t want to “learn” anything that is incorrect. I’ll be sure to let you know if I ever notice anything :saluting_face:. Thanks again!

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bro this is clutch…i have been looking for a while now for something like this. Thank you!

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Sounds like a cool deck. :+1:

It’s also illustrative that the example you used was 馴, which has the 稀 tag on Jisho for almost everything except したがう. WK already has 慣れる covered so I think it’s a good deck for post-WK.

One suggestion would be to add things like 慣れる to the back so you can associate the meaning/reading you’ve already learned to the new kanji.

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That’s a good idea. Now that you mention it, I was just reviewing 附 and that almost always serves as a variant of 付. I have to figure out the best way to implement this idea, but I’ll try to think of something!

By the way, where are you seeing the rare tags on Jisho? I tried to find them and I couldn’t. I’m sure they’re right under my nose but I’m just not seeing them.

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You know I swore I saw them when I was looking this up while writing my post but can’t find it now. :confused: I’ll keep looking and let you know.

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I figured it out. It was the Shirabe Jisho app that I assumed was the same as Jisho

It was also only on specific words like the 馴れ example here so I’m not sure if it’s searchable.

Apologies for the confusion.

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Just to be clear though, 馴 isn’t a joyo kanji, so it’s not in the deck. Or it shouldn’t be anyway, right?

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Not at all; I appreciate you telling me about the Shirabe Jisho app! I somehow never knew it existed and I think it’ll help me a great deal, so thank you!

Yeah, that one’s a jinmeiyō kanji. I remember adding it because it was useful somewhere, but I can’t remember where. I think it was the word お馴染み?

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Ah, yeah, I didn’t catch that, so I guess my original supposition about it not being in WK because it’s usually replaced by 慣 is wrong.

Awesome! Glad you were able to get something out of it. :slight_smile:

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The information does show up in the jisho.org web UI too, just in a different way – if you look up 馴れ you get this page which gives 慣れ as the headword and has a “Notes” section with “馴れ: Rarely-used kanji form.” in it.

This is the way jisho.org chooses to display the JMdict ‘rK’ (rarely-used kanji form) tag, which you can see in the underlying database entry.

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Thank you for this deck! It looks really helpful (especially as I’m aiming to slowly progress towards N1 :sweat_smile:).
At a glance, it’s interesting that I already know a few of those - reading books ftw :rofl:

Thank you so much for this! I don’t know how Heisig’s method works, but that’s what’s always going on in my head. (In fact I find it really annoying that I cannot search kanji (e.g. in Jisho) that way: “Show me all kanji that contain this kanji” or something.)

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I just updated this! I made a few radical fixes, added 50 more kanji, and added a tag for the top 2500 kanji that appear in newspapers as listed by Jisho. I think the Dropbox link is the same: non-WaniKani Kanji Deck 2!

I’m bored so I also made a Venn diagram of what tags apply to which kanji…
decksummary

I did all the tagging manually, kanji by kanji, so there could be mistakes, but I was pretty careful.

Enjoy!

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I just updated the deck again because something didn’t add up, and it’s actually something you all might want to know about Jisho and non-WaniKani kanji…

I’ve been trying to solve the issue of how to handle variant kanji. I don’t want to add more than one of the same kanji to my deck if I can avoid it. I don’t think that’s the most efficient way to study them. I don’t know the “right” way to study them, but it seems to me that 頰 and 頬 look enough alike that if you know one, you can safely remember the other.

Welllllll, in Jisho, the former has the jōyō kanji tag and the latter has the top 2500 tag. So I have both in the deck (as two separate notes) so as to remain consistent with Jisho. I did the same for 剥 and 剝. If you can think of a better way to handle this, I’m open to suggestions because I’m 100% winging it.

I also just discovered that I forgot a jōyō kanji: 楷, which means that style of CJK character writing where every character gets a square (I think?). This kanji is in there now. Sorry about that.

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I felt weird making a new thread and my last thread about this got locked, so I thought this’d be the best place to ask…

How would you break down 蠟 using WaniKani radicals?

I see insect (虫), flood (巛), mouth (口), and treasure (メ), of course, but I can’t tell what to make of that mixture of drops and strokes at the bottom. Heisig refers to the whole right side as “mouse hairs,” the part below flood as “mouse,” and those longer strokes as “tails,” but I can’t arrive at a WaniKani equivalent.

EDIT: I’m going to try 用 for now.

The bottom part of right-hand side is probably best to think of (ねずみ), which is a native radical of its own.

I see above the mouse as a Big X Box. (treasure in a box)

If some patterns are seen repeatedly, it would probably be best to check / propose here – A list of kanji with common components that aren't Wanikani radicals

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Thanks! I had no idea that thread existed!

I got tired of looking up every single darn kanji in jisho, so I used a Jisho API to tease out the good stuff. Here’s my code so far:

print_kanji_info(kj) Function
from jisho_api.kanji import Kanji

wk_radical_dict = {"一": "ground",
                   "ノ": "slide",
                   "亅": "barb",
                   "并": "well",
                   "亠": "lid",
                   "口": "mouth",
                   "化": "change",
                   "力": "power",
                   "田": "rice paddy",
                   "个": "hat",
                   "卩": "stamp",
                   }

def print_kanji_info(kj):
    """Prints information to copy-paste into Anki, using Jisho; str input."""
    r = Kanji.request(kj)
    print("Expression:", r.data.kanji)
    print("Meanings:")
    print(*r.data.main_meanings, sep=", ")
    print("Readings:")
    print(*r.data.main_readings.kun, sep="、")
    print(*r.data.main_readings.on, sep="、")
    print("Parts:")
    for radic in r.data.radical.parts:
        try:
            print(f"{radic}: {wk_radical_dict[radic]}")
        except KeyError:
            print(f"{radic} (Add radical to wk_radical_dict.)")

Obviously, I just started on the dictionary, but at least I know how to expand it.

Here’s sample output if you run this function in REPL:

print_kanji_info("伶")
Expression: 伶
Meanings:
actor
Readings:
わざおぎ
レイ、リョウ
Parts:
一: ground
化: change
个: hat
卩: stamp

I really wanted to make a script that’d just auto-populate the Anki cards. Anki, after all, is made in Python itself. But despite my assiduous Googlings, I couldn’t find any packages that modify existing Anki decks. The best I could find was genanki, but I didn’t feel like making a whole-assed new deck from scratch.

Besides, there exist discrepancies between Jisho’s kanji dictionary and WaniKani’s radical definitions that cause just enough issues that new cards would need that human touch at some point, like how Jisho uses 化 where WaniKani would usually use 亻.

Ah well. I haven’t been coding in Python for all that long. I’ll refine this as I improve.

Huge thanks, now I know what I’m going to record once I finish recording mnemonics for all WK kanji! trunky_rolling

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