The Kanshudo Blog
Study the most important Japanese words first!
Posted: 2017-03-17,
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Continuing our theme of making it easier to learn Japanese vocabulary, we've made several great improvements to Search and Flashcards. It's now even easier to use Kanshudo as your primary Japanese/English English/Japanese dictionary, your primary Japanese flashcard program, or both!
- One of the hardest challenges for Japanese learners is knowing which form of a word to learn. Some Japanese words can be written in as many as ten different forms, and the same form can often be read in different ways. Ordinarily when you look them up in a dictionary, you are just shown them all in a list. Not Kanshudo!
Kanshudo now includes frequency data on every form of each word, and frequency data for each reading. We prioritize the order of the forms and readings we show you based on frequency, and give you information on relative importance of each form. Now you can focus on learning the most useful forms of words!
- You can tag any form of a word as a Favorite, enabling you to learn that specific form. If a word is commonly encountered in kana only, you can tag the kana form as a favorite.
A major problem with most Japanese dictionaries is that they force you to learn kanji you're not ready for, or all forms of a word at once. Kanshudo makes it much easier for you to learn words by letting you study the form you actually encountered!
- Word definitions are now displayed in a much more dictionary-like form, with part of speech information, and different senses clearly separated.
- Now when you click on a word, you see additional information and example sentences without leaving the search screen.
- Search with romaji!
- Results in Quick Search are now much better prioritized.
Check out these great new features in Quick search - run the examples provided, or try your own search.
In Flashcards, we've added a new option (on by default) to enable you to study flashcards in order of 'usefulnesss'. In other words, if you have a set of kanji, vocab or grammar flashcards, or any mix, Kanshudo will automatically choose the most important cards for you to study first.
This is an incredibly valuable feature if you are picking up words to study from things you read. It's not uncommon as a Japanese learner to have to look up tens or hundreds of words in a newspaper or magazine article - even thousands of words for a novel. How do you decide which of those words to learn? If you learn the less common ones, you're much more likely to forget them. Kanshudo now handles this automatically for you - enabling you to study the right words for your level of Japanese.
Plus, creating flashcards from your Favorites has been improved greatly, with a new wizard which lets you choose what type of favorites to import, select a set to import to, and automatically clear your favorites once the import has finished.
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.
