| Overall: | 25 | 12 |
| Design: | 13 | 5 |
| Navigation: | ||
| Usefulness: | 16 | 3 |
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12
Read The Kanji is a web based application designed to help those studying Japanese to learn kanji reading patterns through context. In other words, it helps you learn to read kanji by asking you to read actual Japanese sentences and type in the correct answer (no multiple choice).
Many students of Japanese often complain that learning kanji is the most difficult part of studying Japanese. I've never really understood this, however. It's not as though kanji requires a special skill set or secret method. Absolutely anyone can learn it. The only thing that differentiates a seasoned Japanese speaker/reader from a beginner is sheer practice and exposure within the language.
Getting that exposure, however, is not as easy as it could be. I remember when I began learning, trying to read even a children's book was a real pain. This is because every time I came across a word in kanji I didn't recognize, I would have to look up each individual kanji through radicals, record their readings, then try to figure out what the correct reading of the kanji compound is. This, together with trying to comprehend grammar and vocabulary at the same time, made reading slow, tedious, and just not very fun.
So I wrote Read The Kanji to give myself a fun, easy way to drill myself on kanji readings to improve my reading abilities. Now, with consistent practice, I find that my reading speed has not only dramatically improved, but I made reading and studying kanji the most enjoyable part of my study.
I'm looking to learn about usability, feature improvements, and how useful Read The Kanji is to daily japanese study.
Nice layout and idea. I signed up and have to admit I know ZERO Japanese...was just curious as to how easy it can be to learn Japanese from your site. I created the account and was completely confused as to what the next screen was. Was I taking a test? Was I just using the tool to check something? Then I decided to enter whatever on the textbox and it appear to be translating it to Japanese. I think it would be useful, for me at least, to have a 1, 2, 3 step on what to do after the account has been created.
Also, I think it would be cool if you supported OpenID so I can use my twitter/facebook account with you site.
Overall I love this. Easy to use and actually kind of fun! :D It would be useful to have furigana on the bits of the example sentences not being tested though. If a student is working on level JLPT 4 it makes little sense to be using kanji from level JLPT 3 in the example sentences without furigana :)
This site looks incredibly well done. Nice work on making it look professional. I do run into an issue, however. Whenever I try to check my answer, Firefox wants to download a file "check_answer" which appears as "check_answer/json" in the download window. I recently had a similar issue with some flash files wanting to download instead of run in my browser, but that was easily fixed by going to Firefox's options>applications, and changing it from "always ask when opening the file" to "Use Adobe flash player plugin in Firefox". When I go to the one for json files, I don't get this option however. All I use for plugins is NoScript to temporarily block non-html scripts until I allow them. I've already allowed all the scripts on your site to no avail. I believe it's a missing plugin, but am unsure where to find it currently.
Not sure if this is the system or me ... but it doesn't appear to save from session to session? In other words I do 15 cards in one sitting ... come back tomorrow and have a clean slate? This seems odd since it's tracking your strength with individual characters in various combinations not just whether you have individual cards right or wrong.
Edit: Ooooo nevermind I just realized it tracks this stuff under it's own section.
We don't use any flash or other plugins on our site. Have you tried turning off NoScript completely as a test? If you did that, but are still having issues, would you mind emailing me at joe@squarefour.net about it? Thanks!
Update: One of my users figured out that if you also allow scripts from google (which I use for analytics), that the site will work. In case yours is still not working, I suggest checking to see if it is blocking google scripts or not.
Thanks for the follow-up. Evidently when I tried a full, temp, unblock it didn't go through before. It works now by simply allowing your core site and the googleapis.com script. Now to get learning that Kanji. This should come in handy for chatting with the Japanese players on FFXI. Thanks again!
Edit: lol, also need to allow disqus.com for these posts to work right evidently... gotta admit though, no script has it's benefits. No ad/spy/malware since i started using it.
I really liked the design of this site. It seems to be both human friendly and search engine friendly. My biggest pet peeve is forcing the user to sign up before you give them a preview of what this site does. It's a big turn off and made me want to leave this site immediately after I clicked the Get Started button.
I hope you have a fallback for the signup form that doesn't require Javascript.
I signed up and was immediately taken to a page where I did not know what to do. Perhaps knowing Japanese would have helped but I was lost... The URL was http://www.readthekanji.com/quiz so I assume I was in the quiz already at that point. I was expecting to be taken to a welcome page of some kind though. I also found it a bit strange that there does not seem to be any real "home page" for a logged in user. If I click the Home link it takes me back to the same page a logged out user sees when they first visit your site.