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.

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