Simple writing practice sheets

Hi everyone!

I know that there are a bunch of writing practice sheets out there, but none have been quite to my liking. A bit too much clutter and English everywhere! Seriously though, I find that seeing meanings and multiple readings makes it harder to focus on the kanji and even the kana on the page — Cure Dolly talks somewhere about the hypergravity of English and how it gets in the way, and that is present for me whenever there are things like meanings on the page. The mere presence of English words makes my brain ignore the Japanese and read it instead.

So I made my own after I figured out a way to automatically generate sheets of kanji to practice writing, and I thought I’d share them now that the full set is done. You can download printable sheets for all WK kanji in batches of 5 levels per pdf document, for letter or a4-sized paper. And I also made sets grouped by JLPT levels (just WK kanji included, and level 1 has 900-something kanji in it, so it’s a big file, but some people might want that way of sorting them). Each page has nothing but 6 kanji per page, printed with the stroke order font, and its first WK reading, printed in hiragana for kunyomi readings, and katakana for onyomi (good for katakana practice) and fifteen blank boxes with light gray guidelines for practicing writing each one. Minimalism and no hypergravity. Hope you enjoy!

Wanikani writing practice sheets.

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thanks for sharing those!
they’re really pretty as well.

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Thank you!

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Nice work, as usual!

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Thanks for making and sharing, these are great!

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This is exactly what I needed, not even kidding I was thinking about this. :heart: :sparkles:

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These are great, and a good reminder where I need more practice! :blush: Writing practice brings it home :star2:
Thank you!

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Those sheets are amazing! Thank you so much!
May I make a suggestion? I think it will be even helpful if you can include the stroke orders.

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Those include stroke order iirc, but also do include readings and english definitions. Maybe they’re to your liking. They where also created by someone on these forums, sadly I cant seem to find the original thread.

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The sheets use stroke order font. Check the small numbers next to the kanji strokes. They indicate the beginning of each stroke and their sequence.

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Thanks for the responses everyone! I am so happy you like them, they were fun to make too!

@mnkurniati As @rwesterhof mentions the kanji are printed in the stroke order font which has (tiny) numbers positioned next to the starting point of each stroke. They printed pretty clearly on a laser printer I have access to. If there is any interest I can make a version with larger practice boxes and so larger kanji - that way the stroke orders would appear more clearly. I’ll mess around with making some new variations.

@GrumpyPanda Those are great too! Plus they are on a really nice website. Kanji.sh was definitely an inspiration for my efforts, though my approach was to minimize the “extras” like more readings and meanings. But if you want those things, Kanji.sh is the way to go!

@Beebeechan Thanks! I find writing practice fun too and wanted to make some sheets that enabled me to also refresh my knowledge of the main (mostly onyomi) readings of kanji and get some much needed katakana practice.

@Michiru Glad you find them useful!

@sansarret You are most welcome!

@RoseWagsBlue Thanks! More fun with LaTex! I had forgotten how much I liked messing around with typesetting and making documents until your work got me thinking in that direction again!

And of course @prouleau deserves mention here too since I used the Item Inspector script to get access to the WK data, conveniently organized into custom csv files!

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There is something satisfying about manipulating the details of the structure of the form of a document. Tweaking things to produce a printed document in just the right form. Only something that gives you access to the inner workings of typesetting really does this.
As you have found, it is an extremely time consuming process. But the results, and the process, are art.

This captures it to me:

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Yes this has certainly been true for me! I started using LaTeX many years ago to make slides for presentations in a symbolic logic class I was teaching because I detest Powerpoint and found it far too limited for typesetting technical math stuff. It was hard labor to say the least but also very satisfying to make cool looking slides and documents from the bottom up, with form following function so to speak. Since then I have learned something about writing computer code and my WK projects have led me to explore ways to write FAR less code manually and automate production – LaTeX is a programming language as well, albeit a fairly clunky one, but for loops and other control structures are definitely doable and without them building documents in my old hard-code everything from scratch methods would have made things like this impossible. Plus I have been learning sed and awk and other basic *nix CLI tools to process text files and that has helped enormously.

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@aruke is the author and here is the original thread mentioning Kanji.sh:

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Well, today’s project was adding versions with smaller and bigger kanji.

Large kanji (4 per sheet) are good for practicing with a smallish brush (or a sharpie).

Smaller kanji (8 per sheet) save paper and are closer to handwriting size – hopefully the stroke orders are still visible.

Let me know if any links on the page in the top post point to the wrong sheets. That was the most tedious part of it all – adding the links.

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I’m so in love with these writing sheets!!! Thank you soooo much!!! Will you also be making them for the vocabulary? :smiley::pray::bowing_woman:t2:

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Thanks so much!!! As for vocabulary, hmmmm. I am thinking about what to do next, but I will soon likely run out of free time to mess around with coding stuff, because of work and such. I was thinking of doing something like making some calligraphy practice sheets with a handful of two or three kanji combinations. Perhaps something along the lines of common two kanji words with pronunciation in kana would be feasible using the basic approach I have been following which is essentially using text files as a primitive database which are then parsed and fed into LaTex files. Anyway, I am happy you like these and will ponder (or most likely obsess over!) the possibilities for extending this project. :slight_smile:

Oh and I’ll add some links to the writing practice sheets site that point to a couple of other typesetting projects I’ve been working on, like flashcards and other related things that you might like…

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Yes, I would like to see your other work. I like your style. It’s very clean. Where can I find the link? I struggle with all this technology :pensive:

I can’t even figure out how to do the quote part in a reply. :pensive:

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Just highlight some text in the post you are replying to and a “quote” button appears - click it! :slight_smile:

Here’s a link to the WK things I have been working on, and if you navigate up by clicking on the GWM at the top and then go to the “personal” section you can see links to the other Japanese language stuff I’ve done lately…

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Amazing!!!:hugs::hugs::hugs:

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