Read The Kanji

We have recently set up a support email account to address any issues or questions you might have using the site.  Whether you need help understanding a specific function of the site or are having trouble using a particular part of the site, please send us an email at support@readthekanji.com.

And, as always, you can continue to post questions to us at our Twitter account (@readthekanji) or on our Facebook Fan Page.

The User Voice forum should still be used for general feedback, feature requests, and bug reports.  Please use this in lieu of the support email account for these types of reports.

We have received a lot of questions asking how to control the repetition of certain kanji during a quiz.  Most people would like to lessen the repetition of kanji that they feel they have a good handle on.  So, how do you do this?

The answer is simple.  Under the PREFS link on the menu, you will see a Repetition Factor setting about half way down.  You can set this factor to any integer between 1 and 10 to control how ofter kanji are repeated during the quiz.

But how does this work?  What is the Repetition Factor?

As you progress through the quiz, Read The Kanji determines a strength rating for each kanji that is quizzed.  The Repetition Factor uses this strength rating to determine how often to repeat certain kanji.

For example, if you set the Repetition Factor to 1, then kanji that have a strength factor above 10% will be repeated less often than kanji below the 10% rating; if you set the factor to 6, then kanji with ratings above 60% will be quizzed less than kanji with rating less than 60%.  The strength rating of any partcular kanji is dependent on how often you correctly (or incorrectly) read it throughout the course of the quiz.  Every time you read a kanji correctly, the strength rating is increased; every time you incorrectly read one, it decreases.

So, if you want to breeze through kanji readings of a certain level, simply set the Repetition Factor to a low setting, like 1 or 2.  This will cause any kanji that you read correctly to be repeated far less frequently than any kanji that you have either read incorrectly or haven’t seen yet.  If you want a more intensive review session, then set the Repetition Factor to a high setting, like 8 or 9.  This will cause most of the readings you have already seen to continuously repeat, allowing you to master a select group of kanji before a new set of readings are displayed.

For those that are not aware, Read The Kanji has a Facebook Fan Page.  Please become a fan on Facebook as we will use that in addition to this blog and our Twitter account to post news and updates.

Hi everyone,

While all great things must come to an end, we here at Read The Kanji must announce the end of our free beta test.  Read The Kanji has come a long way, and we feel it has finally reached a point where we feel comfortable charging money to help fund for our server and development costs.  Our goal is to reinvest money earned back into Read The Kanji in order to create the best possible Japanese kanji resource out there on the web today.  To do this, we are in the process of turning Read The Kanji into a subscription based system in order to help keep prices lower than store-bought study materials

In the meantime, while we are busy coding up a robust subscription payment system, we have decided to begin offering lifetime accounts for the fair price of $10.  These accounts will be one-time payments which will allow full usage of the site forever, even after the subscription plans are in place.  This is a great offer as we are planning on lots of active development and big improvements in the future ahead, so it’s a great way for hardcore kanji learners to still get in early and get a great value.

But how will these new plans affect current users?  Well, in short, in won’t.  We’ve decided that all users currently holding accounts will be grandfathered in with lifetime memberships for free!  We received such great support from everyone while building the Read The Kanji system, so this is our way of saying thanks for all of your feature ideas, bug reports, and word/sentence fixes submitted over the past year.

We hope to still have everyone’s continuing support and ideas to help make Read The Kanji the best kanji study tool out there.

Hello everyone,

Apologies for the downtime yesterday, we were trying to implement some new fixes and database changes yesterday, but things did not go as smoothly as planned.  We ran into some unexpected problems and ended up just rolling back to the old code while we try to figure out what the issue is.  We’ll try to push these updates over the next couple of days in separate pieces to avoid such an extended downtime like yesterday.  Thanks for your patience!

Hello everyone,

This Friday, at 8:00am CST (1:00 pm GMT), we will be taking the site down for some code and server maintenance.  We have been working on the backend this month to both create a more speedy, error proof version of the quiz, and to set up the database so we can expand into the new features and suggestions we’re getting from the uservoice forums and emails.

I hope this downtime won’t be a problem, and we only expect it to take a couple of hours to convert the old database structure into the new one.  After that, we hope the new code will speed up the site for everyone, and help eliminate many of those time out errors we’ve been seeing lately!

Hi all!  I just wanted our users to know that we’ve added a small feature to the bottom of the quiz today to allow you to manually inflate the strength rating of a word.

From your feedback in mails and on the Uservoice forum, we noticed a number of experienced users getting tired of having to constantly answer over and over words that they already knew.  We thought to add this feature in to help side-step this annoyance slightly.  And while I don’t recommend people who are just starting to use this feature, it is helpful for experienced students trying to use Read The Kanji.

There are a few things about it that you should know, however.  First, you cannot manually inflate the strength of a compound that you have not answered correctly at least once.  I think this is a nice rule because in my opinion, even if you think you know something, you should still be absolutely sure before trying to skip over it. Also, only a word’s strength is inflated, not the kanji included inside the word .

Second, if you do choose to manually inflate a word’s strength, if the word is below 50% strength, clicking the link will make it rise to 50% (yellow).  If the word comes up again, and you click the link for a second time, it will then raise the kanji to 80% (dark green).  In the future, we may reduce it to just “click once and it goes straight to 80%” if the feedback is strong enough, but because this is a new feature, I thought it would be wiser to have a safeguard in place and see how it goes first.

If you use it often, let us know what you think of it, or if we can improve it in some way.  As always, we are listening and discussing all of your feedback!

Just a small notice that I’ll be away for a couple of weeks, so I won’t be able to fix any errors or problems with database for a little while.  But please still feel free to keep sending your reports, as I plan to go through them all as soon as I get back!!  Thanks!

Thanks to the help of Andrew Slater, we have adjusted a large number of words at Read The Kanji and reclassified them to their correct JLPT levels.  You might find the number of words in each level changed, some very large quantities.  For example, we noticed that over 200+ JLPT 3 words changed to JLPT 4, and many JLPT 2 words have now changed to JLPT 3.

This is part of our ongoing quest to perfect the database to match the official JLPT vocabulary lists as much as possible to help prepare for the 2009 December test!

We have another small update for Read The Kanji users today!

We took a great idea from the Uservoice forum and added some keyboard shortcuts for those people who hate having to use their mouse when they want to see kanji information, reveal hidden quiz elements, etc.  Hopefully this addition will help speed up the quiz overall!

Take a look at the shortcuts and see if they help improve your quiz flow!