300 Kanji in 30 Days — The Apps
So far, all that’s been discussed is memorizing the way kanji characters look. But what about readings? What about studying vocabulary? What about actually understanding how to use these kanji? And how are we going to manage our studies day-to-day?
That’s what the apps are for.
So get your phone out and search the App Store for kanji Flow and download it. I think it isn’t that big so it should download pretty quickly.
When it’s finished launch it and (if it’s not already on your phone) you’ll get a prompt to download imiwa? Do so.
imiwa? is a dictionary and, thus, fairly large so it’ll take a minute or two to download. While that’s happening, let’s talk about what kanji Flow and imiwa? are.
imiwa? is easier, so we’ll start there.
imiwa?
imiwa? is a multi-language Japanese dictionary based on the JMDict Project by Jim Breen. Basically, the JMDict is a user-curated database of Japanese words associated with their appropriate equivalents in a several European languages.
imiwa? is going to help us in a few different ways. First of all, it’s a dictionary so, duh, you’ll use it to look stuff up. You’ll use it when you want to remind yourself of a kanji’s stroke order (we’re going to talk more about stroke order later, too). You’ll use it to get at a complete list of compound words for each kanji you study, if desired. You’ll use it because it’s directly integrated with kanji Flow and it will save you a TON of time typing and/or copy and pasting. imiwa? is awesome and has way more features than mentioned here. Check it out on the web for more info:
The creator of the app, Pierre-Phi, and his partner in crime, Francios, are both wonderful gentleman and work on the app in their spare time. If you appreciate their work, it wouldn’t hurt to toss them a couple of bucks via the homepage’s donate button.
As for kanji Flow, it’s a flash card application but…actually it’s a bit more complicated than that. It’s an SRS app.
SRS — How NOT to Forget
SRS stands for spaced repetition system.
It is used to not forget things.
Basically, if you don’t want to forget something (in our case, kanji characters), you should review it and remind yourself of it just before you’re about to forget.
Too late and it’s already forgotten. To early and you’re being inefficient.
The more times you are reminded, the better you should know it, and the more days you can wait before you need to review again.
Actually, that’s pretty much it.
However, managing such a system yourself can be a bit difficult. Can you imagine if you had 300 physical flashcards and had to remember how many times you used each one as well as calculating when you should review each card again every time you studied it?
Managing the SRS would be more time-consuming than the studying itself so, of course, we should use software for that.
kanji Flow is an iOS SRS app and is great for our purposes a few reasons.
First and foremost, kanji Flow is integrated with imiwa? which means you can create new cards instantly by simply tapping an export button and then an import button. No typing. No copying and pasting. No time wasted making new cards. (You aren’t going to have to make any new cards anyway since I already made complete decks for you).
Secondly, kanji Flow has a built-in example database. It’s going to automatically show you the most common words for any kanji you study or example sentences for (most) words that you study. The contextual study component of this method is available automatically with no extra work required on your part.
Finally, kanji Flow has direct links to search the website (Kanji Koohii) we’re going to be using for story inspirations so you won’t even have to waste time switching to your web browser and doing the search manually.
Again, this method aims to be efficient. I don’t want you using up all of your time making flashcards or tweaking software. You’ll spend about 25 minutes a day studying kanji, and that’s it.
- For those that are interested in the details, kanji Flow and Anki both use the same SM2 algorithm to manage study intervals. The individual implementations are slightly different, of course, but, over time, there won’t be a dramatic difference in how the two would manage your studies.
Let’s get into kanji Flow and learn how to use it.
kanji Flow
kanji Flow can be found at the following locations on the web:
kanji Flow can be a bit confusing the first time you look at it, especially if you haven’t used SRS software before, but it’s actually quite easy to use. We’ll go through a quick tutorial together and then we’ll dive right into actually studying some kanji.
Next: How to Study