Progress Report

Hi everyone,

There has not been a new release in a little while but that merely reflects the fact that I'm currently going through the Henshall list of 1,945 kanji, making sure that the kanji are in the correct sequence and checking the definitions for duplicates. This work should be finished in a couple of days.

Meanwhile, I have kanji lists for 'Reviewing the Kanji' (RTK) and also the KanjiDamage website, which will be made available for people studying from those sources.

A new feature of the upcoming version is that the RTK keyword will be displayed alongside the current Henshall-supplied or user-supplied definitions, to help disambiguating duplicates. Another new feature is a duplicate-cleanup tool that will flag (and remove if necessary) duplicated kanji and allow modification of duplicate keywords. This is very helpful for cases where the original Henshall definitions have more than one kanji for, say, 'child' or 'village'. One great advantage of learning the RTK keywords is that they are guaranteed to be unique, with exactly one kanji per keyword and vice versa.

Finally, I have added another new feature that makes life a bit easier when you are attempting complex kanji. If you get five strokes in a row correct, then you get an error credit, which shows up as a blue square below the drawing page. Your first error cancels out one credit, and so on. This means you won't be penalised if, in a 19-stroke kanji, your hand slips and you draw one line too short. It does mean that an occasional kanji is marked as known where you didn't quite know all the strokes, but you do still have to redraw wrong strokes so your knowledge will move forward. Your time is better spent learning new kanji than getting every stroke 100% perfect.

I found this last feature very useful when I was trying to catch up from a position that was 80+ kanji behind my target of 50 kanji per week. I'm now at 350+ kanji, ten ahead of target, despite taking a couple of weeks of to program.

There are also some improvements to the beginner-friendly IME, which will be the subject of another post.

Please continue to report any bugs, preferably here but by private email if you prefer.