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wayne432 · Joined: 05 Jun 2008 Posts: 255

http://kanji.koohii.com/

Enjoy, it's an online site specifically designed as a flash card program to work with Volume 1. The numbers refer to the text... also it has many more "stories" to help you remember (if you stink at creating stories like I did).

Hope that helps.

wintersweet · Posted: Mon Dec 29, 2008 3:03 am Post subject:

Hoser · Joined: 19 Mar 2005 Posts: 694 Location: Toronto, Canada

Don't know if any of you have posted it yet but if you have an iPhone or iTouch there's a great Kanji app called Kanjiflip. I think it costs about $6 but it has been extremely well reviewed.

http://kanjiflip.com/

Sour Grape · Joined: 10 May 2005 Posts: 241

Anyone else learning to read Japanese by learning words, not kanji? I have no idea how many kanji I know, but I know plenty of Japanese words. Show me a kanji on its own, and I may or may not what it means, but I might know a number of compounds containing it.

I recommend this way of doing it. I learned a load of crime words recently and then sought out news articles about crime to practice. I found it more interesting than learning by character.

Zzonkmiles · Joined: 05 Apr 2003 Posts: 309

Learning words in their natural context is certainly more interesting than just learning a bunch of words in isolation. An alternative is to find a magazine that is related to your primary interest (music, travel, computers, video games, etc.) and learn all the words/kanji you find there. Then buy another magazine related to the same interest and see how much easier it is to understand everything.

Stick with it! Understanding kanji really gives you freedom when you learn a few hundred of them.

Apsara · Joined: 20 Sep 2005 Posts: 2142 Location: Tokyo, Japan

I agree with sourgrapes- I am hoping to pass JLPT level 1 this year and when studying for level 2 in 2007 I stuck to learning vocab rather than individual kanji. That will aslo be my approach for level 1.

I also agree with Zzonkmiles that for the first few hundred very common kanji it is fine to learn them by themselves as they pop up so often.

Once you have got past 1,000 or so though and are into the much more abstract concepts, many kanji only really exist in compounds- you will never see them by themselves, and they can crop up in words with widely different meanings, so learning them by themselves becomes less useful.

Even in the kanji kentei, the kanji test for native Japanese speakers, the readings of kanji are tested as part of words/compounds, not in isolation.