The Kanshudo Blog - older posts
Welcome to the Kanshudo blog! Here you can find older blog posts; the most recent ones are
here.
Today is a big day: we are delighted to announce several major improvements to word search! Helping you learn the kanji is our central focus, but our goal is to make Kanshudo the most useful system for learning Japanese. Being able to search for vocabulary, tag the words you want to learn, quickly create flashcards from those words, and then learn the kanji they contain are core functions for successful study. Today we are announcing a whole series of improvements to how Kanshudo helps you with this process!
First, you can now tag words as 'favorites'! The little green star appears next to words as well as kanji. Most importantly, when you create flashcards from your favorites, flashcards are created for the words as well as the kanji. This basically allows Kanshudo to be your constant companion - look up words whenever you encounter them, tag them as favorites, and then study them in flashcards whenever you have a free moment. See for example this search for
/search?q=漢習道
漢習道
.Next, as you can see from the search above, vocab entries are now bigger and bolder, and they are clickable just like the kanji in search results. When you click on a word, you will now go to its details page, where you can find additional information, links to external sources, and examples. See for example the details page for
/word?w=日本人
日本人
.Search capability has also been greatly improved.
As before, if you enter a word in kanji search, any exact matches (ie words in the dictionary which match your search exactly) will be displayed above the kanji, as in the search above for
/search?q=漢習道
漢習道
.In addition, there is a whole new search page specifically for vocabulary, which does much more. Depending on what you search for, the new system will run various searches, and combine the results:
- Exact matches - the same results that appear at the top of kanji search.
- Words beginning with your search term.
- If you enter a search consisting of multiple kanji, Kanshudo will search for words contained in your search. So for example running the search for /searchw?q=日本人日本人in word search finds additional words.
- If your search looks like a conjugated form of a verb, Kanshudo will try to identify the dictionary form. For example, if you enter 話しています, the present participle of 話す, Kanshudo will show you /searchw?q=話していますthe wordsit thinks could fit.
You can access the new word search here, and you can find it any time from the advanced search page.
With these improvements, when you cut and paste words from anything you read electronically (such as web pages, Kindle e-books / iBooks), or type any word out, Kanshudo will help you find the words, and let you store them for reference. Then, you can review your favorites list and create flashcards to study whenever you have the chance.
Let us know what you think about these improvements, and what other features you would like to see Kanshudo introduce to speed you along the road to kanji mastery!
Posted: 2015-10-14,
Tags:
studyaids
newfeatures
If you are just beginning your study of written Japanese, learning hiragana is one of the most useful things you can do.
By popular request, we have created an overview of the hiragana, and we have made it very easy for you to create hiragana flashcards on Kanshudo. With one click, you can create your personal set of hiragana flashcards!
As with all Kanshudo flashcards, Kanshudo intelligently shows you cards you are finding harder more frequently, and will prompt you to review cards you've learned at intervals to help you remember them.
All registered users of Kanshudo can use flashcards for free. Start your Japanese studies today by learning the hiragana!
We are delighted to announce some major improvements to our flashcards system, along with a new 'how to' guide with all you need to know to use flashcards for your studies.
Here's an overview:
- Spaced repetition: flashcards now automatically include built-in spaced repetition. Cards you have studied will come up for review at increasing intervals to ensure they stay memorized!
- New limits: we have simplified the limits. Pros still have unlimited cards, but can now have up to 2500 cards in a single set! You can put the entire joyo kanji in one flashcard set :-) Registered Users can have up to 150 cards, which gets you through the first few lessons in our graded lesson series. There are no longer any monthly limits on how many cards you can create or study.
- Edit any card: you can now edit any card, including kanji cards, which lets you add your own notes or memory hints.
- Import or manually add new cards to any set: you can now add cards to lesson sets, kanji sets, or any set!
- Bigger, clearer buttons! Plus, now cards have 3 buttons instead of 2 (the new button is an 'only just' button which tells the spaced repetition algorithm to show you the card more frequently).
- New set details screen shows you the study / review status for each set
- Any set can mix and match kanji and vocab
- All existing flashcard have been migrated to the new system. If you had already completed studying a set, we have marked the cards as ready for review in one week!!
We've put together a new 'how to' guide showing you how spaced repetition works. Here's a link: How to use spaced repetition flashcards to study Japanese.
Our goal is to make Kanshudo flashcards your one-stop-shop for managing your Japanese studies. You can now keep all your kanji and vocab flashcards in one place, and study whenever and wherever you like. If you like these improvements, please let us know! (And if you have more suggestions, we'd love to hear from you.)
Whether you are just setting out on your journey to kanji mastery, or you are steadily climbing the mountain, it helps to see the 'big picture' of what you need to accomplish.
We have put together a step-by-step guide which shows you the whole story from beginning to end, and illustrates how the pieces fit together. With our guide, you can see what you need to do first, and then how you need to progress.
For the first time, you can get a comprehensive overview of the entire process of learning the Japanese kanji, all in one place!
To put your kanji studies on a sure foundation for success, read How to master the kanji today!
Today we are introducing the first of a series of step-by-step guides to the more advanced features of Kanshudo, focused on one of the most useful: how to create vocab flashcards.
Kanshudo enables you to create flashcards for words you want to learn, and automatically presents any kanji in the words in the 'cascading kanji' view used in search results, enabling you to learn or re-learn the kanji in the word while you study the word. This is an extremely effective way to improve your Japanese ability.
To see the detailed guide, visit the new How to guides index. The index is also linked from the top STUDY menu, and from the footer. We will introduce more guides based on demand, so if there are functions you would like explained, please contact us!
Posted: 2015-08-20,
Tags:
navigation
usability
By popular request we have added a site index! This is mainly to make it much easier to find pages that can be hiding in different sections, but we've also heard of users running into pages and features they didn't know existed, and the site index should help you find those sooner!
Posted: 2015-06-18,
Tags:
studyaids
One of the most requested features on Kanshudo so far has been a structured way to learn the kanji, enabling even absolute beginners to get started. So we've introduced lessons, which are designed to be a fun and friendly way to take students from a very early stage (knowing only hiragana) through to the second highest level, N2, of the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test), the standard metric of written Japanese, which requires about 1000 kanji.
Each lesson in the series is structured as a series of fun games and exercises - Kanji Match, Jukugo Match, Sentence Complete, and finally Flashcards. We call the series '53 stages of the Kanshudo', after the famous series of ukiyo-e by Hiroshige (and like the picture series, there are actually 55 - there's a beginning and an end!).
The first few lessons are available to all Registered Users of Kanshudo. All 55 lessons are availabled to Kanshudo Pros. To get started, go to MY LESSONS.
For those of you actively studying Japanese, we have great news: a set of 42 collections of all kanji used in the very popular Japanese for Busy People textbook series!
Now you can see the kanji introduced in each chapter at a glance, investigate each one in detail, and create flashcards for study on your computer or smartphone.
The Japanese for Busy people kanji collections include 2 for Book I, and 20 each for Books II and III. A total of about 400 kanji are included. All 42 collections are available to Kanshudo Pros. Registered Users can access the first five, and new users can access the first collection.
To view the collections, click STUDY in the top right navigation area, then select COLLECTIONS from the purple study navigation bar. Or just click here.
Kanshudo is your AI Japanese tutor, and your constant companion on the road to mastery of the Japanese language.
To get started learning Japanese, just follow the study recommendations on your Dashboard.
You can use Quick search (accessible using the icon at the top of every page) to look up any Japanese word, kanji or grammar point, as well as to find anything on Kanshudo quickly.
For an overview, take the tour.
