Request: Kanji learning deck for Anki

[sanahtlig]

I'm looking for a kanji deck for Anki (or other spaced repetition system) with the following:

1. One kanji per card, with a word the kanji is used in (one word or card for -on and one for -kun yomi readings would work too)
2. Asks the user to input the hiragana or romaji to spell the word

I don't use Anki much, so I don't even know if it has this functionality.  I never quite managed to find a good use for Anki, and I'm hoping to change that, but at the same time I don't want to use a learning method that could hinder me later (like matching kanji with English meanings).  I figure that knowing a single reading for the first 2000 kanji would make manual word lookup much easier, since I could instantly "summon" all the kanji I'd need to write an unfamiliar word into a browser.

I'm also interested in other Anki decks for Japanese learning and how people are using them.

[Chronopolis]

I'd reckon there's a kanji deck with related words attached to it, I sorta doubt there's one with input though, even though that's possible.

You can do it the vanilla way and add words to anki as you go, ones which that have a kanji you want to be able to produce, or a on-yomi reading you want to learn. I ran into the same annoyance as you, after one or two hundred words added in that fashion the kanji input problem comes up a lot less often.

[Deep Blue]

the only anki deck that has examples with every word is an n5 level vocabulary one, I haven't seen any other one like that so far even n4 level nor a kanji one.

btw if you are learning them so you can look them up later on you should study the radicals, it is much more easier and it is actually what you want, if you understand how a kanji is composed, what radicals is using, you can look up a really difficult kanji in a very easy way. Radicals = 214, kanji = a whole lot more lol. 

[sanahtlig]

17 minutes ago, Deep Blue said:

btw if you are learning them so you can look them up later on you should study the radicals, it is much more easier and it is actually what you want, if you understand how a kanji is composed, what radicals is using, you can look up a really difficult kanji in a very easy way. Radicals = 214, kanji = a whole lot more lol. 

I've tried multi-radical lookup and what I discovered is that it's a lot less intuitive than it seems.  It appears that every kanji has "standard" radicals that "spell" them; you can't tell what radicals compose a kanji simply by looking at it.  I've eyeballed kanji and tried to match radicals that appear to compose it, and usually I'm "wrong" and the kanji doesn't appear in the list of matches.  These "misses" eat up a lot of time, especially when I need to look up 20 different kanji all at once.  Not to mention multiradical lookup is absolutely worthless when the kanji is one of those blobs of 25 lines where you can't even make out the individual strokes.

[Deep Blue]

1 minute ago, sanahtlig said:

I've tried multi-radical lookup and what I discovered is that it's a lot less intuitive than it seems.  It appears that every kanji has "standard" radicals that "spell" them; you can't tell what radicals compose a kanji simply by looking at it.  I've eyeballed kanji and tried to match radicals that appear to compose it, and usually I'm "wrong" and the kanji doesn't appear in the list of matches.  These "misses" eat up a lot of time, especially when I need to look up 20 different kanji all at once.

Well like anything related to the japanese language is not something easy to do and it takes time to properly understand it, most of the time the radicals are so "deformed",  they need to make them "fit" inside the kanji so they compress or stretch them and that is what it makes them hard to know which one is it in the first place but once you get used to it is really easy.
A book that explains how they are "deformed" is Remembering the Kanji, he explains radical per radical, how they normally look and how they look inside a complex kanji (how it will actually look most of the time inside a kanji).

[sanahtlig]

10 minutes ago, Deep Blue said:

Well like anything related to the japanese language is not something easy to do and it takes time to properly understand it, most of the time the radicals are so "deformed",  they need to make them "fit" inside the kanji so they compress or stretch them and that is what it makes them hard to know which one is it in the first place but once you get used to it is really easy.
A book that explains how they are "deformed" is Remembering the Kanji, he explains radical per radical, how they normally look and how they look inside a complex kanji (how it will actually look most of the time inside a kanji).

That's not really the issue I think.  The issue is that there's the radicals that are "supposed" to compose a kanji, and then there's the radicals that would "fit" but aren't "correct".  Basically, you have to learn how to "spell" kanji with radicals.  But if I know how to "spell" it, that likely means I know the kanji anyway... why do I need to look it up...

I checked out the N5 deck you linked.  That was useful, but unfortunately I already know at least one word for 95/100 of those kanji, so I wouldn't have much to learn from that deck.

Like Chronopolis said, I may just have to build my own deck to achieve my specific purpose.  That's kind of a pain.  Is what I'm trying to do really that unusual?

[Deep Blue]

5 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

That's not really the issue I think.  The issue is that there's the radicals that are "supposed" to compose a kanji, and then there's the radicals that would "fit" but aren't "correct".  Basically, you have to learn how to "spell" kanji with radicals.  But if I know how to "spell" it, that likely means I know the kanji anyway... why do I need to look it up...

I checked out the N5 deck you linked.  That was useful, but unfortunately I already know at least one word for 95/100 of those kanji, so I wouldn't have much to learn from that deck.

Like Chronopolis said, I may just have to build my own deck to achieve my specific purpose.  That's kind of a pain.  Is what I'm trying to do really that unusual?

it's not, for example I made my own deck of vocabulary for n3 words because the ones available are not what I want or need and it takes a lot of time to do it myself but in the end it pays off. 
Did you try using ocr programs? that could be a shortcut for what you are looking for at least for now, assuming that what you are reading are not physical books. 

[sanahtlig]

17 minutes ago, Deep Blue said:

it's not, for example I made my own deck of vocabulary for n3 words because the ones available are not what I want or need and it takes a lot of time to do it myself but in the end it pays off. 
Did you try using ocr programs? that could be a shortcut for what you are looking for at least for now, assuming that what you are reading are not physical books. 

Yeah, maybe I'm too hung up on making my own deck.  I just thought it'd be too time consuming.

I tried the suggested OCR tool for VNR and never got it to work.  Tyrosyn suggested using the Microsoft IME tool or some such (I think).

[Deep Blue]

31 minutes ago, sanahtlig said:

Yeah, maybe I'm too hung up on making my own deck.  I just thought it'd be too time consuming.

I tried the suggested OCR tool for VNR and never got it to work.  Tyrosyn suggested using the Microsoft IME tool or some such (I think).

because that one sucks (i think it's called modi ocr or something like that)

try with this one

http://capture2text.sourceforge.net/

[Tyr]

I recently discovered this site for learning Japanese: https://www.renshuu.org

I like it very much. It's far better than Anki for me, mainly because of one thing: it keeps me motivated.
It manages my learning sessions for me, it uses a well defined dictionary and has many pre-compiled lessons (JLPT, Kanji Kentai, some popular textbooks) where you can make your "deck" from and you can choose what kind of questions you want to be ask (meaning, reading and such...). You can also input kana instead of using multiple choices for questioning.

For kanjis, I have made two schedules for me. One for recognizing kanjis which is faster and covers more characters and one for actually reading them which also asks me for readings and radicals but introduces kanjis at a slower rate.

[Chronopolis]

13 hours ago, sanahtlig said:

Yeah, maybe I'm too hung up on making my own deck.  I just thought it'd be too time consuming.

I tried the suggested OCR tool for VNR and never got it to work.  Tyrosyn suggested using the Microsoft IME tool or some such (I think).

Here's my format. For words where an English word is more helpful, I add the English meaning at the front. For colors and things that are hard to imagine, I sometimes add pictures. I also have a few, but not very many kanji definitions, which are based off of goo's kanji entries. I only use those when I want to explicitly see the meanings of the kanji, usually words alone will do.

I get my definitions from http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/ . Sometimes I supplement with goo's thesaurus differentiation and examples. When the result's not in goo, by searching google + 意味, you'll get a http://www.weblio.jp/  , or a yahoo or goo Q&A page.

I feel like maybe 1/4 of my deck is of wierd/random stuff I almost never see. Not sure what I think about that. Probably no need to go overboard with rare words to start.

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