Free kanji writing trainer
I stumbled on a free website which gives the user practice writing the jouyou kanji. It doesn't do very sophisticated stroke recognition, and it leaves it up to the user to decide whether an attempt to write a kanji was correct or not (after showing you each "correct" stroke after the one you make along the way), but it's still an adequate tool for committing how to write the kanji to memory. Here's a link to the website:
http://www.kanji-trainer.org/index.php
There are many kanji training programs for Nintendos and Playstations, of course, and recently there have been some made for Android devices, but programs for Windows users have always been few and far between, and several promising programs have died out or moved to other platforms. One can, of course, use the handwriting recognition tablet built into Windows itself, but that's not really set up for systematic kanji learning. If anyone knows of any good recent kanji training programs written for Windows, please post something here about them.
http://www.kanji-trainer.org/index.php
There are many kanji training programs for Nintendos and Playstations, of course, and recently there have been some made for Android devices, but programs for Windows users have always been few and far between, and several promising programs have died out or moved to other platforms. One can, of course, use the handwriting recognition tablet built into Windows itself, but that's not really set up for systematic kanji learning. If anyone knows of any good recent kanji training programs written for Windows, please post something here about them.
posted by fuonk
Comments 13
Try Skritter.
Skritter costs $15 a month. That's far too much. Three months of subscribing to Skritter would pay for a copy of Lexikan if it were still available.- During a month of Skritter, you are able to download as many items for practice as you want. Once you download and practice a term, you can practice it again indefinitely for free. There is no limit on how many terms you can download. Hence, all of Skritter is available for a one time payment of $15. If that's far too much, then stick with that website you were using. It was very... underwhelming, but yeah, it doesn't cost a penny.
- I wasn't aware that you could reuse things once you downloaded them. I thought you could only use Skritter at the website. $15 is not unreasonable, but I don't see why anyone would subscribe for longer, then.
I agree that kanji-trainer is primitive; it does the job if one doesn't have access to something better, though. - When you say you can download items for practice, are you talking about the Android practice app? I don't have an Android device, and asked specifically about Windows apps.
To me it was pretty useful. Thanks for the link!- Windows also considers items as "downloaded" through their website. If you have all three, android, iphone, and PC, any progress you make on one is carried over to the other two. Hence during that one month, I "downloaded" large amounts of things on all three, and they are all on the account. Even though the account is no longer paid.
- @WingedLama: You're welcome!
Sort of liked it, but only getting a reading and an English translation felt a bit lacking to me, especially for characters you normally see in compounds.
You're probably right there aren't a whole lot of programs for Windows, but then again, you can run both console games and android applications in Windows if you'd like. Google play has this supported without resorting to sketchy emulators, right? I never tried, but heard you should be able to run android apps on your computer without too much trouble.
I use a Nintendo DS game called Kanken DS. Provides a sentence with the tested character missing, giving you a better idea of how it's used as well. Also has modes for reading and stroke order among other things. Got mine for about $7. Not sure what a DS is these days, but I think it's worth considering. I really like going with the stylus.
As for android apps, found this similar looking one on Google play. It's a joint development with the organization holding the Kanji Kentei examination in Japan, just like the DS game mentioned. It's free until level 5, which should mean it includes about 2-3000 characters. Says it has 8000 questions available for free anyway. Might be worth a try! The low score on Google play is probably due to the fact that they charge you to try the higher levels, and appearantly for the "exam mode" as well. You can find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.co.imagineer.kanken.start&hl=ja
Not quite what you asked for, but thought I'd mention either way.
@dddd, Oh wow. Just noticed you said this is an Android App. I thought you were still talking about the DS game. Definitely interested in checking that out.
Level 5 of Kanji Kentei isn't quite as high as what you mentioned though. The first six levels of Kanji Kentei (level 10 up to level 5) only test elementary school kanji. Those 6 levels are match the 6 year grades of elementary school. So level 5 (the sixth level from the bottom) tests on the total number of kanji you should have been taught by the end of grade 6 (so only the 1,006 教育 kanji). This is the same number of kanji that Slime Forest offers in its free version, and JCJP is getting close to this number too (also free, of course). ^^- Ah! You're right. It's 1006, yeah. I didn't realize the outline I checked was a running total. I added up the totals. I didn't tally all the way to level 1, but if I had, I might have realized something's not right... :D Having to learn around 18000 to get through the game would be a daunting task of VERY questionable value. (Ran a quick search out of curiosity. The largest Japanese-Chinese dictionary in print seems to have 51000 unique characters. Yikes!)
Sure most of you have tons of these lists, but found this tidy sheet for reference. http://www.kanken.or.jp/kanken/outline/data/outline_degree_national_list.pdf
I completely stopped practicing writing after my first year of studying. Been using this game for a about a month now, and it's starting to look better! I can see why Japanese people might not find the free version of the app very useful, since they probably practiced tons in school, and will refresh the stuff they forgot quickly, but if you didn't practice writing much, it's not bad.
Didn't know about Slime Forest. Downloading! - @dddd, I used to have a program that you can search all those 51,000 kanji in (plus even more characters on top of that amount)!
超漢字検索 "Super Kanji Search":
http://www.chokanji.com/ckk/
The Windows and Linux versions offer a free trial for the first 10 days, but it costs 6000 yen to register after that. It also has an app you can buy for Android or iOS too, which I think is online opperation only but costs quite a bit less. However, this program doesn't give any definitions for the kanji—only readings. And it doesn't even distinguish whether the readings are 音読み or 訓読み—simply just listing all the readings comma-separated all in hiragana. It's mostly useful for just finding a character image, variant forms, and characters related to the one you searched for; and also useful for referencing code points and other indices. On the whole though, it isn't terribly helpful for people just trying to learn the language, but still cool to check out the free trial and be overwhelmed by the insane amount of kanji. ^^ - beeantさんへ
Please remove depand's account; he or she is clearly a spam bot.
