Kanji LS Touch (writing/learning japanese characters) Reviews

Will revolutionize your kanji learning!

ACLee

For the serious but busy student of kanji, this app is worth $11.99 plus the cost of an iPhone or iPod Touch if you don't already own one. This is much more than just glorified flash cards. I've tried carrying flash cards for spontaneous study when I have random down time. Here's why this app is simply on another level: - automated Leitner system and tracking of your mistakes - option to practice actually writing the kanji and check stroke order, or multiple choice if you prefer - versatile test options - meaning, On, Kun (or both), missing kanji in a compound - way cooler than flash cards. This will make you want to practice!

Great start, but much room for improvement

SlowLerner

First off, this app has great promise for learning kanji. However, it can use a fair bit of improvement to justify its high cost. Feature requests: -- loading very large practice sets is SLOW -- list manipulation: it would be nice to create lists inside the app and not just import them from elsewhere. Also, joining lists (say from two different lessons) would be extremely useful. -- the current way of testing meaning (by typing words in from the keyboard) is time consuming to the point of being useless. It would be better to have a more sophisticated word search function that would save time.

The ultimate tool for learning to WRITE kanji

tokyokps

I'm an avid app store user, and this is my first iTunes review ever. This program really hit a sweet note with me so I'm happy to share my experience and hopefully promote the good work the developer is doing. If anyone has ever studied kanji in class, the traditional way is to have a paper with the first box in a grid filled in with a particular symbol, and you practice writing the kanji over and over until you remember it. The fundamental problem with this method is that you inevitably look at the kanji to the left, and just copy what you see, without building the muscle memory needed to reproduce the kanji from scratch when you are presented with a blank sheet of paper and nothing to copy from. The brilliance of this program is that it always presents you with a blank screen (with the English meaning and/or On/Kun-yomi), and you have to draw the symbol from memory, with nothing to the left to copy from. But then you get to very quickly compare what you drew side-by-side to the correct symbol (stepping through the strokes in order if you care to get picky), and judge yourself whether you got it right or not. Forgot the san-zui or put an extra stroke in somewhere? Hit "wrong" and put it in the "needs some more practice" stack. What really worked for me is the speed that you are able to be presented with a meaning, draw the symbol onto the screen, compare it, and get instant feedback on whether you got it right or not. I kicked and screamed my way through 4 years of college Japanese just hating kanji renshu and memorization. 10-years later when I needed to brush up on my handwritten Kanji to pass a handwritten Japanese proficiency test, this program actually made it fun to study Kanji again. The ability to whip out your iPhone on a train or while you're waiting for your meal to arrive and get in some meaningful symbol *writing* practice is pretty much impossible with any other method, no matter how you slice it. For those wondering as I did how exactly it works, there are two fundamental modes: Practice, where you can see the meaning, compounds, and the symbol on the screen. You can practice tracing over the top of the symbol in the correct order stroke by stroke as prompted. You can then hide the symbol, draw it on the screen, the turn the symbol back on behind what you drew to see how you did. I typically picked ~20 symbols at a time, went through the practice mode a few times to get aquainted, the moved to Test mode. In Test mode, it gives you the meaning and/or reading, and you draw the symbol on the screen. If you mess up, you can just hit clear and try again. Once you're satisfied, you hit the "solve" button, and it shows you what you drew side-by-side with the correct symbol. NOTE: IT DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY TELL YOU WHETHER YOU DREW THE SYMBOL CORRECTLY OR NOT. You make that judgement yourself by comparing the two side by side. Once you get into it, the flow makes perfect sense: as soon as you hit solve and see the two together, you'll immediately recognize when you've screwed up click "Right" or "Wrong." Those you got wrong it keeps in a temporary list that you can then go back and practice and retest. Another useful feature is that it keeps "correct percentage" statistics on each symbol, so you can test yourself on symbols you get wromg >25% of the time, for example. I would only really recommend this program for those really wanting to learn to write Kanji. If you're looking for a Japanese/Kanji dictionary, the free "Kotoba!" is the best out there, with a million different pieces of info on each word/symbol. If you're looking for a vocab flashcard program just for symbol recognition, there are more general flashcard programs out there that have better UI's and more flexibility for making your own lists. But if you want to learn to write Kanji, bingo. As for cons: The program takes longer than most to load, and to start Practice or Test mode with a large vocabulary set can take many seconds (sometimes 10-15) to start. Once you're in a list though, it is pretty responsive. I still do run into the occasional crash, but it is generally not annoying enough to significantly blemish the experience. Last, I'm now moving over to Chinese and downloaded the Chinese LS program, which is basically the same UI as Kanji LS but with a few new/different tweaks such as the ability to write compound words and import custom lists, although the program seems a little more buggy yet and not as refined as Kanji LS. Still, I hope to see those new features brought into the Japanese program as well. Finally, a big thank you to Jan Bogner for your work in developing these programs! Great work.

Great application, great update.

Dr. Jonathan Fields

This app was good before and most of the complaints have been addressed in the latest update. There is no reason a student of Japanese shouldn't get this app. It's certainly a worthwhile investment.

Best iPod kanji app

St. Nick Name

Very cleverly overcomes the iPod's crappy touch resolution to make practicing writing kanji possible. Needs the ability to edit lists from within the app. Importing custom (but static) lists is not quite good enough, especially if you like to come up with mnemonics while studying. Still, it blows away the iPod kanji competition.

Not too shabby

Gandalfxviv2

It's a bit overpriced for what it is, but it's decent. The UI could be improved a bit. I think it would be nice if the program itself could decide whether your input was correct or not--at least in the practice window where it shows you where to draw the lines. Instead, you have to tell it whether you were right or not. And it would be nice if you didn't have to go to the settings menu to change what kind of test you wanted to do and what set of kanji to test. When you start a new test it should open up a window asking you what kanji set to use and what type of test to do, maybe even how many characters to test. The data could be populated by the defaults set in the settings menu, but it should be something you don't have to go to the settings menu to change. Also, I just opened it up again after having closed it and now when I check my answers it doesn't show the right answer, so I don't know if I'm right or wrong. This bug needs to be fixed.

Great app!!

GaelicDragons

I was looking for a tool to study Japanese that would allow me to do more than just memorize flashcards and this app is exactly what I wanted. It allows for practicing writing kanji and not just learning meanings (although it does that too). It has stroke order and allows you to test yourself without seeing the character first although in the practice you have the option of seeing it or not. This app is a bit hard to figure out at first but the programmer answered my emails extremely quickly and helpfully. The only real downside is it's a bit pricey but as someone who usually only downloads free apps I think it is totally worth it.

Thank you so much!

Edmud

This app is the best thing out there now for learning kanji. I find the interface to be elegant and intuitive. I look forward to any improvements that you make in the future but in the meantime I will enjoy the app as it is now.

Best-of-breed kanji-learning app

Bob in Tokyo

I bought Kanji LS Touch 1.4.1 a bit over a week ago, and it has been an epiphany for me on how kanji learning apps should work. I love it. There is some limited overlap between this app and the excellent and free Kotoba! app, but I prefer Kanji LS Touch by far for studying kanji systematically. In practice mode it allows you to paint the kanji with your finger, and you can turn cuing on or off. In cuing mode, it shows a faded version of the kanji in the background (either system font or handwriting font) that you want to paint, and indicates the next stroke and where it starts. You can and should turn that off after a few practices so as to exercise your own memory, but you can always toggle it back on. The kanji set you want to study is highly configureable, as is the way you test yourself. Generally useful predefined kanji sets come with the app (grades 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, secondary school kanji, JLPT N5, N4, N3, N2, N1, all joyo kanji, and all kanji (over 5,000), as well as custom sets that you create and import yourself via a free service such as dropbox. As mentioned, the flashcard tests you set up are highly configureable, with reading to kanji, kanji to reading, meaning to kanji, kanji to meaning, fill in the missing kanji, etc. with options for either timed multiple choice or your typed-in answer or painted-in kanji. When you paint in the kanji, you end up being the ultimate judge of whether the kanji is right or wrong. To decide, you touch the "solve" button, and the kanji you just painted is displayed alongside the correct kanji (again, toggle-able between system and handwriting font). But one of the refinements that make this an absolutely best-of-breed kanji learning app is the "stroke" button you can push to check your work while you're on this screen. Push it once, and you can see both the correct first stroke and where it starts juxtaposed against your first stroke and where you started it. Pushing this button repeatedly, you can step your way through the entire kanji, making sure you got all the strokes right. If you got the order or direction wrong, you'll notice it, and if you left one out, even a "minor" one, you'll really notice it when the highlighted strokes get out of sync as you step through. And even if you got it right, this serves as one additional reinforcement of the correct stroke order. Again, it is up to you how stringently you want to grade yourself. If I'm off with the proportions, but get the stroke order right, I score it as "right" even though an elementary teacher might mark it "wrong." But if stroke order doesn't matter to you, you're free to ignore even that. Also, as with many flashcard kanji learning systems, you can turn on the Leitner system, which basically keeps track of which kanji you're having more trouble with, so that you can study them more. My only quibble with this app is that the choice of kanji-related vocabulary is occasionally curious in containing seldom-used words. Many will be disinclined to purchase a $12 app when a very good app like Kotoba! is already available for free. A miser by nature myself, I can identify with this attitude, but it is a false economy. How much is your time worth? Kanji are absolutely essential in advancing your Japanese language skills, but they are a high mountain to climb. You should give yourself every advantage for mastering them efficiently!

Good already, could be even better.

awef

Would be good to add audio playback of character to reinforce learning. Would also be good to be able to more easily sub-divide each group further for more bitesized learning.

Kanji LS Touch (writing/learning japanese characters) Reviews – Page 2