Just realized that there are no notifications 
I can’t trust myself. That’s one of the reasons I use Wanikani. I already forgot about this app twice🥲
Review notifications, when there are 10+ reviews available, would be nice.
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I personally hate it when apps send notifications to remind me to use their app more often, but I can see how some people could find it useful. I’ve added a feature request here to have this as an option.
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I really like this app and used it every day for maybe 3 months or so and about 200 kanji. I want to give more useful feedback because I like it so much, but I almost don’t have any. Even though it’s still in its infancy and a bit rough around the edges, I just thought this morning, if the development gets dropped I could use it like this forever, lol.
An actual tiny feedback is that when you didn’t know the kanji and the green dots appear to show where to begin with the stroke, they ‘jump around’ for every stroke. I’m not actually sure it helps me. Also, when all dots are shown at once, they don’t help me at all because it’s so crowded. I get that you want some sort of middle ground between showing the actual shade vs not showing anything, but for my personal learning style it does not do much.
A question that came to my mind was how the intervals between the levels are. Are they the same as in WK? (Aka-chan, Gakusei, Senpai, Tensai, Sensei and Apprentice, Guru, Master, Enlightened, Burn)? So Sensei takes the kanji out of the rotation?
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The SRS algorithm used is documented here. The tl;dr is that the spacings are continuous, meaning any number of days, hours, or even minutes are valid. Reviews are never removed from the queue, but the spacing increases exponentially, meaning eventually the spacing is so large that you’ll effectively never see it again. Kanji you find easy will approximately double each time you get them correct; harder ones will increase more slowly.
The groupings shown on the stats screen are arbitrary, and just there to give you an idea of how you’re progressing. Currently they’re grouped like this:
Aka-chan: < 1 day
Gakusei: < 6 days
Senpai: < 18 days
Tensai: < 40 days
Sensei: >= 40 days
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The link does not work for me.
Thanks for the break down. Maybe the spacing for the intervals could be a bit increased giving the learning happens exponentially. Thinking in days and a base-2 exponential, you have 1 day which is aka-chan, 2 and 4 days for gakusei, 8 and 16 for senpai, only 32 for tensai and everything else sensei. At that point, you’ve seen it 7 times, whereas e.g. WK shows it to you 9 times to be in the highest category.
I think what I observe for my own distribution is that it’s super top heavy even for words that I am not super confident with. Burning in WK is really quite confident. Just brainstorming, I’d propose something like
| category | days |
|---|---|
| aka-chan | <2 |
| gakusei | <8 |
| senpai | <32 |
| tensai | <128 |
| sensei | >128 |
With 128 days we’re at about 4 moths, which is the same as WK. It will come back in 8 months because Ringotan doesn’t burn, but it’s gonna be very rare and the title ‘sensei’ might be more warranted.
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This assumes you’ve gotten it correct every time. If you never made any mistakes even when learning, and then continued to remember it for weeks after, I think “sensei” is reasonable.
Funnily enough I used to have sensei as 90 days, and people complained (somewhere in the above thread) that even after using Ringotan for a long time, they still had “sensei: 0”.
I’ll try adjusting it to a middle-ground.
Haha okay, maybe it’s a matter of taste as well. But at WK, it also takes people months and months to burn their first item. But yeah, in the end it’s maybe also not super important, haha. I guess you could also just show a histogram of all kanji with their interval on the x axis and some adequate binning, since it’s a continuous scale.
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I’ve added this idea to this thread. I’m planning on adding a “stats” screen with some graphs eventually, and this is a great candidate. Thanks!
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Hi @BlueRaja!
I’m having a go to your app and it’s pretty nice! 
I have a couple of questions 'cause I can’t figure it out myself 
-
In custom review one can also look for kanji, but that works only when typing the reading but not the meaning. Is that correct this way?
-
There should be 3500 kanji, but I’m only able to see 3250 again in custom review. I tried all combinations from Wanikani upwards but 3250 is the maxinum I can see (set to JLPT). Am I missing something incredibly obvious?
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If one sets the learning according to, say, WK, then how the other kanji that are not on WK are learned?
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This is a great suggestion! I’ve added it here.
Ringotan supports 3544 kanji, but not all of them are in any one lesson-plan. In particular, “JLPT” contains the vast majority of them, but it’s missing 134 that are included in “Remember The Kanji”, and 154 that are in the “Kanji Kentai Test” (there is some overlap there).
From what I’m seeing, they consist of rare kanji like 袷, 虻; and rare alternatives to more common kanji, like 姐.
If there is interest, I can look into adding these into the “JLPT” lesson-plan. I should note that at 3250 kanji you’d already know more kanji than most college-educated native speakers.
You can switch between lesson-plans any time in the options. So, once you complete all the Wanikani ones, you could switch to (say) the JLPT one. The app still remembers which kanji you do/don’t know.
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Hi there, BlueRaja! Since your original post was in 2021, I am wondering… is this app still free? I am happy to help with catching and squashing bugs - I have some experience testing (most testing I’ve done has been for games but that has been for both PC and Android). If not, if it’s at a reasonable price and has good reviews, I may purchase it. If it’s super cheap and my rewards cover it, I might, too.
You should cross-post this in the API section of the forums, too. People generally look for apps there!
EDIT: Oooh, I like that the website says it also supports textbooks… I can try to go through the Genki vocab that way. Anki wasn’t making it stick.
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Maybe after sensei… Shisho?
(Or another master-related word that is above a sensei ???)
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Yep, still free in 2023! I plan to make it paid once the word gets out more. But everyone who downloads it now will keep the full version for free forever.
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Cool, I’ll be checking it out later this week then - maybe even as soon as tomorrow! I wonder how it will fair with the much older version of Android I have on my Wacom Cintiq, too… (beautiful tablet… very old Android OS… but beautiful tablet…) XD I’ll install it to my current cellphone, first though.
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Thank you!
That cleared out all my questions and I’m glad you liked the suggestion .
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This is a nice feature!
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I started using the app a bit. It’s very nice and straightforward, and I really like the fact that you can choose various orderings and start wherever you like ! But I do have couple questions / requests.
- The number of times I had to write each new kanji before it entered my review list felt extremely high. Is it because I was doing something wrong ? Is there a way to make it lower option ?
- Can I change “kanji list” at any time ? I try be the order indicated in “custom reviews” didn’t change.
- Is there something close to the topokanji ordering ? I really like this ordering.
- I’m not sure I understand how lesson work. Does it take a various number of new kanjis based on the number of reviews I have ? Can I see the number of new lessons I did in a day ?
- I’m doing the RTK order, which in theory should use recall (kanji meaning to strokes). Would it be possible to see the kanji meaning as a prompt, rather that after writing it ? The vocab prompt at the top can sometime play that role, but not always.
Thanks !
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I also recently discovered the app from this thread. It is by far the best kanji writing app that I have seen.
Is there a plan to test words, rather than kanji? It looks like you have example words for every kanji, so once the user knows all of the kanji in a word, they could drill on that. I guess you would have to deal with kana in some way.
Thanks for your work (saved me the bother)
— Dave
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It felt right to me, at least for kanji that were completely new to me. I guess I could add a “fast learning” mode that skips some of the steps. I’ve added this as a suggestion here.
Note that if you already know a kanji, you can skip the learning process entirely in the upper-right.
Yes.
Added a ticket here
Yes, one lesson is meant to be one “unit” of cognitive load. So as long as you use Ringotan at approximately regular intervals - whether that’s once a day, 5 times a day, or once a week - the app will give you the appropriate number of reviews and new kanji automatically.
The SRS algorithm is also smart enough to correctly handle the case where you review more or less often than usual.
This was already requested here but I don’t think I will be implementing this feature, for the reasons stated in the thread.
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No plans, no. This app is meant to be used alongside other learning methods, and there are already a lot of good solutions for learning words (including Wanikani!)
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