We're delighted to introduce several new vocabulary collections which address both of these issues at once, and are ideal for building both your kanji knowledge and vocabulary: the most useful word for every reading of every kanji.

There are 2136 Jōyō kanji, which in total have 4266 official readings (an average of 2 readings per kanji), so the collections present 4266 words. Learning these words is the best way to ensure you know all key readings of each of the 2136 Jōyō kanji, and a great way to learn 4266 of the most useful Japanese words.

Additionally, we include the subset of 3319 words which are 'level-appropriate' - i.e., the words most useful to learn when you first encounter the kanji. (Some readings of kanji are much less common, and not worth learning until you reach a higher level.)

Use these collections to create flashcards, add favorites, test yourself with Quick Test, or play study games!

Now, example sentences have something similar: click any word in an example sentence's short form view, and a new section we call 'dynamic details' will load containing all information pertinent to that word: for example, any grammar points that touch on that word, inflections, word details, and details of any kanji it contains.

Additionally, we're delighted to announce a feature that has been requested many times: the ability to toggle furigana for example sentences! You can now click the icon to the left of any example to turn furigana on or off. You can modify your default preference in your Account page.

Let's look at an example (no pun intended!):

First, go ahead and click the furigana icon - notice how the furigana (kana characters that show you how to read/pronounce kanji words) appear / disappear.

Next, click on 言われる: you'll see the 'dynamic details' view appear with details of the inflection being used, the word 言う, and the kanji 言. There's a SEARCH link so you can search for 言われる in Quick Search, and if you want similar information for all words in the example at once, you can click the DETAILS link.

The original Component Builder introduced a key innovation which made the process even faster: the ability to identify a component just by typing its name. Once you know the names of standard components such as 'tree' (木) or 'sun' (日), you could simply type the name rather than searching for the component visually.

Today we are delighted to introduce another leap forward: the ability to look up any of the 400+ components used in Joyo kanji simply by drawing it. Just fire up the Component Builder, identify the components in your kanji, choose the easiest, and draw it in the drawing area! Drawing a component is much easier than drawing a complex kanji, and our system, which is built on a custom neural net designed by Kanshudo, will recognize any of the components used in Joyo kanji.

To get started, click here to open up the Component Builder in Quick Search.

For more details, read our detailed how-to guide to the Component Builder.

We're writing this post to let you know about two small but valuable additions to Kanshudo: an item view for flashcards, and a list view for favorites. Read on to find out what these are and how useful they can be!

First, we've added a new view to complement the standard favorites view. In the (original) standard view, each of your favorites is presented in the same way it appears in Kanshudo search results, along with the ability to click each item and see more detail, view a kanji's components quickly and easily etc.

The new favorites list view provides a short form text summary of each of your favorites, and allows you to select each favorite with a checkbox. You can then selectively add your checked favorites to a flashcard set of your choosing, which gives you much finer-grained control.

The new item view for a flashcard set essentially gives you the opposite. Until now, the only view of your flashcards in any given set was a summary view which gave you your learning statistics and rough data. Now, we've added an item view for your set cards, which shows you each of the cards in standard Kanshudo format. To see the item view, visit your flashcards index and click VIEW for any set.

Note that any flashcards you have imported as plain text (ie, without using smart import) will not appear in the item view. If at all possible use smart import - Kanshudo flashcards are far more useful when you use them to study kanji / words / examples / grammar that the system recognizes, as Kanshudo uses that to measure your Japanese Mastery Level.