Vocabulary Flashcard Printable PDFs by Level

Now replaced by this thread:

Paper flashcards, so you can study when you are not in front of the screen:

Level 1 vocabulary
Level 2 vocabulary
Level 3 vocabulary
Level 4 vocabulary
Level 5 vocabulary
Level 6 vocabulary
Level 7 vocabulary
Level 8 vocabulary

Kanji with stroke order levels 1 through 10

Kanji

Kanji Matchups:

Kanji Match-Up 1 and 2

All radicals mini-cards. Except that there are maybe a dozen radicals missing, for technical reasons which I cannot be bothered to fix and which I shall not explain:

All Radicals Mini Cards

Mini Cards Kanji, 32 per page, less paper used:

Levels 1 though 10 Kanji Mini Cards

These are my most perfected versions. The cards are alphabetized by level and numbered. You will notice that each set begins and ends at weird spots of the page, for technical reasons:

Levels 1 through 10 Vocab Mini Cards
Levels 11 through 20 Vocab Mini Cards
Levels 21 through 30 Vocab Mini Cards
Levels 1 through 30 Vocab Mini Cards

Here is how I use the cards, in accordance with the principles of SRS. I keep three piles on my desk.

  1. Unknown
  2. Learning
  3. Whiz

The real point is the “Whiz” pile. SRS keeps you perpetually on the borderline of things that you have to work to remember. As we all know, this can be exhausting. Sometimes, each day, I want to spend some time practicing things that I am already good at. So, I flip though that “Whiz” pile. These are cards that I instantly know the answer to. I get practice in quick recognition plus I get a feeling of accomplishment watching this pile grow.

Here is my highly simplistic but functional LateX source, if anyone cares:

% printable flashcards for Wanicani kanji
% uses the flacards class because it is easyier than the more common flashcards class
\documentclass[letterpaper,frontgrid]{flacards}
\usepackage{color}
\usepackage{xeCJK}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{anyfontsize}
\usepackage{hyperref}
\fboxsep=12pt
\renewcommand{\brfoot}{}
\renewcommand{\blfoot}{}
\renewcommand{\frfoot}{}
\renewcommand{\brfoot}{\footnotesize\thecardno}
\renewcommand{\cardtextstylef}{\Large}
\renewcommand{\cardtextstyleb}{\Large}
\setCJKmainfont{Meiryo}
\begin{document}
\pagesetup{4}{8}
\renewcommand{\blfoot}{\footnotesize1}
%%fronts and backs of each card go in brackets below
\card{front}{back}
\end{document}

Let me know below if anyone actually prints these out and uses them.
:slight_smile:

32 Likes

Found a small flaw in my PDF sheets. Unfilled pages are being left out. I will correct shortly.

(all fixed now)

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Nice work! I will probably steal your code to turn some of my Anki cards into real cards.

By the way, you should have a look at XeTeX. It’s compatible with LaTeX, but offers a lot of extra features to deal with multiple fonts/languages in the same document. In particular, it compiles much faster than LaTeX + CJK. (If you really want to make a lot of cards, it’s definitely going to have a noticeable impact).
You can also compile with XeTeX in all online TeX services I know of (like Overleaf and Sharelatex).

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These look really cool! Nice work.

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Thanks. I looked around on the web for how people handled kanji in LaTeX documents, and I chose CJK because it was the first thing that I could get to work, even though it seems to be on the outdated side. It does compile slowly - thousands of cards at once would be a real problem.
The real problem that I had was using c++ to manipulate the text files with kanji characters to add the latex markup. In other words, to populate

with data. I found lots of stuff on how to work with UTF8 files, but nothing that I can use without spending way more time than I have right now. The next thing that will try is to use emacs. There are only a few areas that I am completely comfortable with programming-wise and emacs happens to be one of them. From a brief experiment, it looks like it can handle my UTF8 files easily.

3 Likes

Agreed, Emacs can handle pretty much anything (it’s Turing complete after all).

If everything works out fine for you, I guess there’s no need to hurry, but you should still have a look at XeTeX. It changed forever the way I deal with Japanese in PDFs. XeTeX is also compatible with Beamer, by the way, if you need to make presentations.

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I will look into XeTeX before I finish this project. CJK is definitely clunky.
ありがとうございます。

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Great help!
Thx for these @RoseWagsBlue!!
Looking forward to the next uploaded vocabulary PDFs.
Take care!

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My cards:
IMG_1039

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I posted my first kanji match-up worksheet. What do you think?

I have a nice automated system to make them now, but I haven’t found a good way to include stoke order diagrams.

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Kanji Stroke Order font, which I can’t recommend highly enough. (Shameless plug: which I also utilized in my Unobtrusive Stroke Order userscript)

3 Likes

I have used the Kanji Stroke Order font quite a bit. But, I am having trouble using a truetype font with pdfLaTex, or with LaTeX in general. I like sticking with LaTeX formatting, because I can easily write code that generates multiple sets of cards.
I have seen plenty of instructions on how to install new fonts, but I haven’t been able to give the problem a few hours of my attention to get everything working right. (it looks like I should use XeLaTeX)
:slight_smile:

2 Likes

I’ve been using XeTeX engine exclusively for 8 years now and it didn’t even crossed my mind that you may have problems with truetype/opentype fonts. : )

2 Likes

It’s not even that much of a hurdle.
It can interpret any LaTeX code out of the box, and it can use any font installed on your computer.
The thing that I really loved about it the first time I tried is that doing CJK only requires:
\usepackage{xeCJK}
\setCJKmainfont{IPA明朝} %or whatever else you like
(Or nothing, if you use fontspec to explicitly switch to a Japanese font when needed)

Also, you can set different fonts for all environments or types of emphasis. For example:

\usepackage{fontspec}

\setmainfont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{Palatino Linotype} % \rmfamily
\setsansfont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{Tahoma} % \sffamily
\setmonofont[Scale=MatchLowercase]{Lucida Console} %\mffamily
\newfontfamily\myownjapfamily[Scale=0.92]{IPA明朝} %\myownjapfamily
\begin{document}
This is the main font
これ、普通のCJK
{\myownjapfamily だが自分で交換することもできる}
\end{document}

Edit: all that was typed on my phone. Expect typos/innacuracies

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Finally got xeCJK working. It does process way faster than CJK.
The main problem that I had is that my XeLaTeX was corrupted, which I guess is what has given me trouble before. So I updated it and it worked fine.
So, now that I have that working, I made a set of flashcards with the levels 1 through 10 kanji, with a large stroke order diagram on one side, and the definition and pronunciation on the back.
image

4 Likes

This is excellent. Thank you so much for sharing.

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Thanks for the cards, I will definitely use them.

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This looks great =)
Might be a bit early for you, but I’d like to see some later levels :wink:
I have already burned half of these levels, and feel rather confident on most vocab up to ten.
I have some leeches in the teens, and the 20’s are still new so would love to print those =)

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I’m getting a system down for creating the cards, so I am starting with the lower levels.
I am pretty happy with my system now, so I can do the rest in just a little time. Here is the question: are they better in individual levels, or in a bunch of levels at once? I can do 10 levels at once as quickly as I can do one single level.
I just answered my own question. In a couple of days I will start uploading them in batches of ten levels at a time.
I should warn you that when you actually print them out and cut them up the stacks grow alarmingly. :slight_smile:

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That sounds great! =D
I’ll gladly do 10 levels a time =)