Hey folks!
I’m working on a new project and I need your help. I’m currently researching various kanji learning methods and approaches from the point of view of all kinds of Japanese learners (beginners, advanced, fluent, even natives).
For this project to go well I need to gather a lot of data and reach as many people as possible, so if you could give me 5 minutes of your time it’d be of great help. All I need is for you to take this survey. It will ask some questions about kanji, try to answer as best as you can (but don’t worry, **there’s no wrong answers**). The test might seem a bit long, but there’s also a short version so if you don’t have time you can just take that one instead. Thank you so much!
Native speakers are also very welcome to participate, although some questions might not apply much to you.
**tl;dr**: Take this survey https://forms.gle/eZeY3qfL6bsy2WQP8
This is 100% completely anonymous and I am not going to make money out of any of this. The outcome of this survey and project will be 100% free and open source, so rest assured. Also thanks to the mods for letting me post this here, I really appreciate it.
よろしくおねがいします
Note: I’ve had a few comments from people taking this survey that some questions were vague or not clearly defined, etc. Some of it is **on purpose**, don’t overthink it and just go with what you think might feel right to you.
19 comments
Cool. I’m interested in seeing what you come up with. You should post here once you do.
Also, about the quiz, I wonder why you designed it the way you did. Like I’m not advanced enough to recognize some of the kanji and yet it requires me to write the first reading that comes to mind. What if I don’t have anything that comes to mind?
Also for the kanji ranking thing, personally, if I know a kanji, I know it well. Especially ones that are very different and unique. I’d recommend putting some of very non-unique kanji and ranking between those (like 法, 洗, 流). But more importantly those questions don’t really make sense if I don’t know the kanji. Maybe put a question first saying ‘which of the following do you know’ and list a bunch, then a follow up question saying ‘out of those selected, rank from most easily remembered to least’ or something.
Took the survey, hopefully you get useful data out of this
Interesting survey. My one point of frustration was with the “rank the ease of recognizing these kanji”. In some cases I knew all 3 without blinking, but still had to rank them with different difficulties. In other cases, I had two that were identical in difficulty.
Also the question about what dedicated method for learning kanji we’ve tried. I’ve tried multiple of those, and it would have been nice to give feedback on all of them, instead of just one. (I answered with the one I’m currently using, which I find effective)
Thanks for making me aware of how much I suck.
the blurred kanji questions were fun
That was fun. And yeah, the ranking one was hard for me. I knew all the kanji already, so I remember them all equally. I tried…but…eh. I kind of see where you were going with it, but I think you’ll probably get better data from people earlier in their learning process than me.
This was an interesting exercise for me, having just reached the last level in WaniKani. To make sure you got good data I ignored the predictive text on my Japanese keyboard and did not change any answers from the answer that first came to mind.
If you are interested I’ve done a bit of research for myself on some of the common errors I made when learning on WaniKani (like if I confused one kanji with another, misspelled the reading じょう／じょ or りょう／りょ, input a semantically similar word that was not accepted like net vs netting for 網, or tying to recall the definition of a word from the kanji meanings like equality for 均整 instead of symmetry or coal for 炭鉱 instead of coal mine.)
I think including ideas like this in a kanji learning method might be helpful for some learners. My biggest problem is confusing similar kanji. To that point I’ve also found that it happens more with kanji in isolation than as part of a word. Like show me 墨 and I might get confused and think こく or 黒but show me 墨絵 and I know right away it’s sumi-e. I also find it really difficult to remember the more irregular readings like 奉行. (Hint it’s not ほうこう).
Anyway hope that was helpful and best of luck with your project. I look forward to hearing more about it.
Awesome, I did a similar study on how people learnt hiragana if you want the data 🙂
Which question was vague? I thought everything made sense.
It kinda pissed me off that the “knowning a kanji” question wasnt multiple choice and also didnt have reasonable awnsering choices. It didnt go from low to high understanding but seemed pretty random.
Hey, just finished it. I had a typo in my Email and only noticed it when I pressed on send. What can I do to get the email when your project goes live?
Happy to help! Good luck with your project.
Please keep us posted!
This is a malformed survey. Some questions need a multi-select checkbox format. For example, I have done both RTK and WaniKani.
I could recognize a lot of the kanji! Pretty cool, blurred part was a bit difficult. I study with the Kodansha Kanji’s Learner Course and personally it’s the most invaluable resource I’ve ever used.
I didn’t leave any feedback on the form, so I’ll do it here instead. I could not give a clear answer to the question when do I know a kanji. I don’t study the characters, I study vocabulary and only care about being able to recognize said vocabulary. Recognizing kanji in isolation is nice, but I find it much less important. I am not sure what the right answer to that question would be in my case. Maybe something like: when I know enough words that use the kanji or when I’ve learned words that cover all readings of the kanji.
this is anko from the eljx – wanted to warn you that likely none of my answers are remotely correct as I am 日本語が苦手
Very interesting survey! I enjoyed filling it out.
When I got to the part where it was asking me how easy particular kanji were, it complained that I was giving more than one answer per row, even though I wasn’t. Maybe it’s incompatible with Firefox.
I responded. Was pretty familiar with everything shown with the exception of the guess the reading page. I had never seen any of those words before, which I imagine was the point.