Show HN: Learn Japanese Kanji, no silly mnemonics

https://www.kanjideck.com

by romes • 2 years ago

7 3 2 years ago

metters2• 2 years ago

Those cards look great and I hope this will help some people to learn kanji.

However, I fail to see the USP in comparison with cards like, let’s say from white rabbit press [1]. Is there supposed to be any?

This comes of as simple advertisement.

[1] https://whiterabbitpress.com/kanji-flashcards/

romes• 2 years ago

Despite it being an advertisement of something I've done -- in the Show HN sense -- there are many features which distinguish it from other existing resources. For instance:

- Highlighting the Kangxi radical really helps with visually breaking apart the components of each character, and often serves as a hint for the meaning

- Include the meanings for the kun'yomi readings trailed by okurigana, most often verbs and adjectives, which can be easily conjugated according to included cheatsheet

- Always try to use compound examples which only use Kanji seen before according to the order (and, within the same JLPT level, we also topologically sort the Kanji s.t. components appear before Kanji they are part of)

- An etymological classification which hints towards the origin of the character, and, in the digital version, includes a link to the corresponding wiktionary page which often has an explanation. Broadly:

    * Pictographic, a Kanji whose origins lay in "drawings"

    * (Compound) Ideographic, where the Kanji represents an idea or forms a new idea resulting from the meanings of its components

    * Phonetic, where one component (typically the radical) gives a semantic to the character, and another component gives the phonetic family of the character. Essentially the semantic comes broadly from the semantic component and then multiplexes on the component which provides the sound...

On white rabbit specifically:

- We do the traditional flashcard style, where no information at all is given from the back

- We include card markers for physical spaced repetition ala Leitner Box style

- Afer going through the physical cards, eventually up to N3, students have access to the full digital Anki deck to continue studying through all the Joyo with a better scheduler (Anki's FSRS).

Of course, that's where we stand on the design space. A key differing point is mnemonics, which are very common in these resources, but that we purposefully do not use (in fact, this deck was first born out of the frustration with existing mnemonic-based resources, as they typically are disconnected from any real etymological reason, or from the character at hand).

metters2• 2 years ago

Thanks for this extensive response. I respect what you created there, my comment was not supposed to talk down your creation!

As I already said, they look great! Wish you all the best and lots of success, I mean it.

Edit: maybe add this explanation about what makes your product so special to your site. I mean this extensive explanation (or did I overlook it there?). I am not sure whether it is a good idea to refer to competing products though, this is a question for marketing persons.

Edit2: also, you are absolutely right, this is a show HN post. I should not have made that part of the comment. I apologise.

Show HN: Learn Japanese Kanji, no silly mnemonics

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