New Feature: Notes
Hello again! We’re on another feature roll this week and we’ve got a new one to debut today on Read the Kanji: Public Notes.
Learning words using dictionary definitions alone can sometimes be a little vague. Although a word may embody a particular meaning, learning when and how to use it is not as easy. Most dictionaries or word listings, however, don’t offer any extra information on words, such as connotations or etymology.
Many of you share information with us about obscure readings and differences between words in our database. This information could be shared in a much better way, because it’s not only helpful for memory recall, but most of it is also incredibly interesting!
So it was a natural fit for us to include a note system in Read The Kanji. Each word has it’s very own notes section where you can add those interesting tidbits.
How to Add A Note / Features
Adding a note is as simple as clicking on a word in the History Bar and clicking the “Add Comment” link at the bottom of the details popup. We’ve limited comments to 500 characters at this time to avoid very long diatribes.
You can also “like” other people’s comments, which helps determine the sorting order for comments: the most-liked comment shows first, so if you find a comment helpful or interesting, click the heart icon to the left of the comment!
Note Guidelines and Suggestions:
We hope to build a database of high caliber notes for all users, so here are some suggestions for notes we think would be most useful:
- Mnemonic devices - Tips that you use to help remember the word.
- Connotations - Learning a word’s meaning is easy enough, but learning when to use it is much harder. In what scenario is this word best used?
- Differences - Synonyms are often challenging for new language learners to grasp. What’s the difference between this word and others with similar meanings?
- Etymologies - Japanese especially has a wide array of wonderful origin stories (known as 語源 (gogen)) for particular kanji compounds.
If you’ve got anything remotely relevant to a particular word, please feel free to add your idea. We’d love to hear it. Notes will be lightly moderated to ensure there is no obvious spam or abuse.
We believe that every student can be a teacher and we hope that through these notes you’ll start to provide bits of wisdom to enrich the community of learners on Read the Kanji.
New Feature: Leveling System
We’ve added a new feature to Read the Kanji: A Leveling System.
Now your experience finally adds up. With every correct answer you earn points (wrong answers do not count against you), and as you earn more points you level up! It’s all contained neatly in your Session Bar at the bottom left corner of the quiz.
Let me break down the Session Bar.
Your Details
Your avatar (which can be changed at gravatar.com) and email are displayed. Only you can see your session bar; your email address is not shared with other users.
Progress Bar
Your current level is displayed to the left of the Progress Bar. This represents the range of experience you have earned so far.
The Progress Bar itself will fill up as you earn points by answering words correctly. You’ll see how many points you earn float up from the Progress Bar. A word’s experience value decreases slightly each time you get it correct, encouraging you to learn new (and perhaps more challenging decks) as you master your current decks.
To the right of the Progress Bar is the next level you’ll achieve when your Progress Bar fills up all the way.
Session Stats
Your Session Stats have been around for awhile, so there’s nothing new here. The total words seen, total correct answers, total incorrect answers, and your success ratio are displayed. You can reset your “session” with the Reset Button at the end of this Session Bar.
We’ve included this leveling system to be used to enrich upcoming features we have planned; but for now, we hope it serves as a fun, simple addition that helps you make more sense of your progress while making Read the Kanji even more enjoyable to use.
New Billing Process and Monthly Subscriptions
We’ve been working hard to improve the billing process and some inner-workings of Read the Kanji. We are pleased to announce a much smoother billing process, and a switch to a convenient monthly subscription.
The monthly subscription will be a recurring subscription at $5 per month. This roll-out, scheduled for the beginning of next week, will also be accompanied by some new features, including pronunciation audio for kana decks.
The Yearly subscription will only be offered for a limited time, so now’s the time to grab it for only $20 per year.
Existing subscriptions will not be affected by any prices changes; in fact, your current subscription will continue to be honored as it recurs.
Happy Holidays,
The Read the Kanji Team
N1-N5 Have Arrived!
We’ve finally updated from the old JLPT levels to the N1-N5. Our decks follow the basic requirements provided by the JLPT.
The JLPT has five levels: N1, N2, N3, N4 and N5. The easiest level is N5 and the most difficult level is N1.
N4 and N5 measure the level of understanding of basic Japanese mainly learned in class. N1and N2 measure the level of understanding of Japanese used in a broad range of scenes in actual everyday life. N3 is a bridging level between N1/N2 and N4/N5.
Although this update comes right after a JLPT exam, we hope it can better prepare you for the next one.
We also made some fine-tuning adjustments to the algorithm, so you may notice an improvement in how you are quizzed.
Source: jlpt.jpFunctionality & Feature Updates
First off - a big thank you for bearing with us as we quickly worked through the hiccups of rolling out the new version of Read the Kanji. Over the past few days you may have noticed some issues with performance and functionality, but we’ve been hard at work resolving them. We’re back in action.
Secondly, we wanted to share about a couple simple but useful features we added based on your requests:
We want to manually reset our session stats, to help us monitor our progress.
We added a total count, in addition to displaying the number of correct, incorrect and overall success ratio. We also added a reset button that only resets your current session stats.
We want to see definitions with just a glance.
It’s live on the site. For long definitions, you may still have to click/hotkey the item details to see the complete definition, but you’ll have a good 40+ characters displayed automatically.
Toggle English Sentences.
Now, if you’ve decided to hide the english sentence in your settings, you can show it (with the “EN” helper link below the input bar) if you need a little extra help answering with the correct reading.
Announcing the new Read the Kanji
The new version of Read the Kanji has finally arrived and we couldn’t be more thrilled to share it with you. We’ve taken a huge step forward in bringing a truly immersive experience.
Read the Kanji’s new interface and algorithm allow for smarter streamlined drilling, so you get plenty of exposure to the kanji you haven’t mastered yet. Let’s take a look at some of those improvements:
Goodbye old, archaic settings.
We removed several old settings because they are no longer necessary. The new algorithm is smarter than ever. It analyzes your progress and determines what to quiz.
There are still several settings we feel help cater to your unique study needs. All quiz-related settings have been moved to the quiz interface. All account-related settings can be found on the “Settings” page.
No more Fail Review.
The new algorithm eliminates any need for a Fail Review. It automagically knows which kanji you need to review more or less frequently.
Context is King.
We have focused on reading kanji in context, because that is truly the most effective way to clearly understand kanji. We stripped out auxiliary elements like the Big Kanji and Meanings to center our focus on contextual sentences. The font size has been increased for easier readability.
Kanji Help can still be quickly accessed with a hotkey (ctrl+k for Mac, atl+k for WIN/Linux) or by clicking on the kanji.
History Bar revamped.
We moved your most recently quizzed items to a history bar that spans the top of the quiz. Again, we wanted to focus on the quiz and put most auxiliary elements out of focus. The History Bar shows you your most recently quizzed kanji, the correct answer, and your answer (if incorrect). It allows you to quickly compare your answer to the correct one, while indicating your color progress on that kanji.
Click on an item in the History Bar to expand/collapse its details.
We’ve worked hard to make this version of Read the Kanji as beautiful, reliable and smart as ever. Nothing is perfect, but perfection is our goal—which is why we love hearing from you, whether it’s a question, inaccuracy, issue or feedback. Don’t hesitate to email us at support@readthekanji.com
Down for Maintenance
Read the Kanji will be down for some upgrades & maintenance for a few hours today, starting at 10:00am CST. We aim to be finished by 2:00pm CST.
Update: Sorry for the delay. We encountered circumstances that are making this take longer than expected.
Thanks,
The Read the Kanji Team
Change Plans At Any Time
Some users have been understandably frustrated by the inability to downgrade a paid subscription to a Trial subscription without losing access to the full term of the paid subscription. We realize this is an oversight. You should be able to change subscriptions as needed to fit your desired usage of the site.
In light of this, we added the ability to downgrade accounts without losing access to your current subscription. When you sign up for a Yearly subscription, it is recurring. However, if you decide the Yearly subscription no longer suits your needs, you can downgrade to Trial at any time, while retaining access to your paid Yearly subscription until it expires. We will automatically downgrade your account when your paid Yearly subscription expires.
Of course, you can just as easily change it back. Simply change your subscription back to Yearly, and it will automatically renew when your first year ends.
Reset Your Stats
Ever felt like starting over on your Kanji quizzing, but realized that you had to create a new account or email support to clear your stats? Well, no more. We recently added a feature that let’s you reset your own stats as you want.
Click PREFS in the main menu on the top right to access your account settings. You will see the Reset Stats button on the right.
Clicking this button will prompt you for confirmation to reset your stats. By confirming the deletion of your data, your stats will be cleared, and your account will be like brand new.
This feature will only affect your stats and not any other data in your account.
Small downtime tomorrow for server maintenance
A heads up to all our users: ReadTheKanji will be down from 9:00am to about 10:00am Thursday, September 15th CST for server maintenance. During this time users will not be able to access ReadTheKanji or their accounts.
This update is to do a some server upgrades to hopefully improve the speed of the site for users site-wide, so although we are really sorry for the inconvenience, we know it’ll be a well appreciated upgrade for everyone!
Thanks,
The Read the Kanji Team
