Singularity on the Plane

I learned all grade 1 and 2 kanji some time ago. I could recognize the shape, know at least one reading and its meaning, and draw it properly. However, because lack of usage, I now forget how to write many of the kanji.

To not let it happen again, I’m going to mnemosyne all of them. Here’s how it looks in Mnemosyne:

When faced with kanji writing questions, I must switch to a program I developed for this purpose, StrokeReplayer:

I then draw the kanji in the top left canvas by holding the left mouse button. Right clicking will delete the last stroke and middle clicking will delete all the strokes. The stroke order and direction can be replayed:

How do I know whether I answered correctly? Just enter the kanji or its JIS code in the textbox and the references will appear:

The default is Taka which uses Java applet. To see the reference from KanjiCafe which is an animated GIF image, just click its link:

The last reference is just a still text which shows how the character is rendered in two fonts (MS Gothic and MS Mincho):

I’ll probably add other kanji stroke order database when I download them.

After the review, I must go back to Mnemosyne to grade myself. The answer section of Mnemosyne shows the correct character. This is so that I do not accidentally test the wrong character, for example 生 instead of 活 which both sounds and mean the same (ignoring nuances). The difference is in its grade which is shown in the category, but I can picture myself overlooking it or forgetting which is which.

Yes, this process is more complicated than it should be. Mnemosyne seriously needs plugin support or at least hyperlink and applet support.

Anyway, I’ve finished drilling my first 1500 words. I’m too lazy to give an accurate count, but I seem to score above 95% in my first drill (both the Japanese to English and the reverse version). Many mistakes are because of string inequality, for example answering “left” instead of “left hand side” and “to think” insead of “to think about”. After that I just repeat the stuffs I got wrong. I then repeat the whole thing again and again until I decided that it was enough.

I’m now writing the stroke order of grade 2 kanji in my reference book, moving them from the mixed and messy “reference & practice” book. After that I’ll add them to Mnemosyne. I’ve done the same thing for grade 1 some days ago.

After the grade 2 kanji is done I’ll finally advance to learn something new: grade 3 kanji!

PS: The stroke replayer is pretty cool. Since the example used a really dull character here’s another one:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 9:06 am by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under Japanese, Study, Works. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.