Singularity on the Plane

A go player once blogged along the lines of “For an effective study, it’s not enough to see on the computer screen. To really feel the flow of the game you must pick the stones and lay it out on a real board.”

Those are wise words indeed, and applies all the same to kanji writing study.

On the early days of my kanji study, I only put “reading” questions on the flash card program Mnemosyne. Those are questions such as:

Q: 火
A: ひ (fire)

When given the question (e.g., “火”), it tests whether you know its reading and meaning. However it doesn’t test your writing ability at all.

Of course, my naive hope was that “if I know how to read it, I’ll know how to write it”. However that certainly isn’t true. For one thing, I know lots of logos (Windows, Firefox, Ubuntu, UGM, ITB, etc) but couldn’t draw them. Practicing reading will only improve your reading ability, and to be able to write there is no way other than to practice writing.

So, realizing that I forget how to draw many kanji, I started putting “writing” questions in Mnemosyne such as:

Q: ひ (fire)
A: 火

(The questions are per kanji, not per word. Therefore there are no questions such as だいがくせい (大学生) because it asks for 3 kanji)

Initially, when faced with writing questions I would draw the kanji on computer using my own program StrokeReplayer. However, writing using the mouse is clumsy so I resorted to the traditional ink and paper:

I’m really feeling the flow of the kanji…