Learn Japanese Kanji: Benky‪ō‬ 4+

just bought it

couple of lessons in, the design is awesome

Great app with room for improvement

I have been using the app for two years now, and I think it‘s probably the best basic 暗記 app for vocabulary and kanji alike. That said, I think there are some features that I would really (I mean seriously) want to see. Here‘s my list of feature requests 😄. Yep, it‘s a long post but I‘ve given a lot of thought into it, and I‘d be really happy to see this great app become greater still in the future! After all, I‘m (happily) paying for a subscription here 😉

What: Filter for cards according to FlexSRS streak (for targeted study)
Why: In FlexSRS I always have to go through ~80 cards with a streak of 5-15 before I see the first 0-streak card. This is kind of annoying, especially on days where I don‘t have much time. Yes, there is ‚study lowest streak‘ quiz-type, but this one also includes cards that are not even in FlexSRS. In general, I would like to filter for cards that have a high/low streak when selecting cards, just like I can filter for the JLPT level or frequency.
Suggested Implementation: add ‚streak‘ as another filter category in the selection menu. This would allow users to selectively study weak cards or remove strong cards from FlexSRS more easily. Of course, another quiz type such as ‚study by streak‘ as an addition to ‚lowest streak‘ could also be a nice option.

What: study all-cards mode
Why: currently, when selecting all available card types the cards presented will still be drawn randomly from the database. However, I would like to have a mode that would make sure to add all selected card types from the same word or kanji to the same quiz. To make an example, let‘s say we select from vocab both ‚english->japanese‘ and ‚japanese->english‘ and we say we want to study 20 cards from the entire JLPT 5-1 set. If for instance the「勉強->study」(jap.->eng.) card is included by the system, the reverse card (eng->jap) should also be included, to make sure we think about the term 勉強 twice in the same quiz round. And similarly for kanji as well, except there we have 4 possible card types.
Suggested Implementation: either a new quiz type or an option for the existing custom quiz, whichever is easier to implement.

What: related terms quiz
Why: In many cases there are terms that are similar but different (just think of the many verbs that use 「生」, e.g.「生きる」, 「生かす」,「生じる」…). Currently, there is no way of studying such related terms together. Being able to study terms that use the same kanji would be a nice feature that would not even require a content-based association of terms into groups. Although, of course, content-based lists of association terms such as 「掃除」,「塵取り」, 「掃く」, etc. in a group „cleaning“ or „household“ would be great as well! (After all, this already exists for kanji in this app).
Suggested Implementation: more pre-generated lists to study vocab that use the same kanji and/or terms that are conceptually related even if they don’t share kanji (probably more work todo). At least for the same-kanji lists, an automatic option should be feasible without manual curation.

What: intermediate-difficulty word jigsaw
Why: that‘s actually a feature from the „Lirer“ vocab app which I really like. They use three steps when asking for the reading of a term. First they do a multiple-choice, then they offer a jigsaw puzzle of all kana involved in the pronunciation which the user has to put in the right order, finally they ask the user to write/ type the pronunciation out all by themselves. This app does have the first and last option but not intermediate jigsaw option. I‘ll admit this app is fine without such a feature but I still really like the idea.
Suggested implementation: add a third intermediate difficulty level between multiple choice and free-type. Maybe for streaks 3-6?

What: word puzzle
Why: speaking of jigsaw and gamification, my personal take on it is: the more fun the better, so I understand if people feel differently about this and whether it should be included into this primarily flashcard-based app. Anyway, it‘s again a concept from „Lirer“. They offer a side-by side ‚puzzle‘ with japanese terms and english translations and it is the user‘s goal to match the cards. Of course, ‚Lirer‘ organizes its vocab into groups based on the content and meaning, so that the terms presented also are related to each other and are not fundamentally different. I think this feature would make little sense if 10 fundamentally different terms are presented so the user can make out the obvious matchings without much thought. But it would be a nice quiz type for related terms, I think.
Suggested implementation: yet another new quiz type

What: audio-quiz
Why: there are certain terms which I have no issues reading because I know the kanji involved but that have an non-canonical pronunciation and which I therefore tend not to understand when I hear them, because in the vocab app I mostly just identify them visually. Therefore a quiz type or option to go only by audio would be great. Although, this would require an example sentence to be played followed by the term in question, due to the homophonicity of many terms.
Suggested implementation: a quiz type that works by audio japanese->english using example sentences.
Suggested implementation: a new quiz type for audio. iOS text-to-speech would be totally sufficient so no need for a professionally recorded set of phrases.

What: fill in the gap
Why: well, if we already had a database of example sentences for the vocab then we might as well have a ‚fill the gap‘ kind of quiz to also aid in context-awareness for terms.
Suggested implementation: yet another quiz type.

Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks a lot for taking it serious! I hope to keep you (the developers) busy in the time to come. よろしくお願いします😉

Entwickler-Antwort ,

That is an awesome review, thanks!! your suggestions will be studied for future improvements!

more vocab please

I hope that much more vocab will be included. To learn the Quartet (2) Kanji I need certain combinations which aren‘t available. For example in the first (7.1) Chapter there are simple words such as 厚さ and 選択肢 which aren‘t in the dictionary. I haven‘t even looked further than that…

Also you can only practice single kanji writing?? How is that efficient? Learning every single kanji by itself is not useful. There needs to be an option to be able to write out whole words that consist of more than one single kanji.

I hope there will be a notes feature to make a note for kanji or vocab (they often don‘t show all important meanings etc.)

Entwickler-Antwort ,

Thanks for the feedback. Will add the note feature. As well as custom Vocabulary. Finally, there might be a way to quiz vocabulary by handwriting soon. Thanks for using Benkyō!