In my last post I mentioned I was starting over with Hesig Remembering the Kanji, and I did. However, the amount of time I was dedicating to studying wasn’t as much as I had hoped, or as efficient. So it has taken me a lot longer to study and get through kanji, however while I am making progress I realized I was studying kanji wrong, but my personal feelings about paper were getting in the way.
Enter Actually Writing Kanji
The main thing I was doing wrong with studying, is not writing down the kanji, much. I just kind of aimlessly try to review based on how it looks every time. Considering I got up to about 1500 kanji last time around, and I didn’t remember as much as I should have, I decided to change it up over the last couple of weeks and write down every kanji as I review it, usually multiple times.
What About the Tablet?
I really don’t like paper at all, its like sand, it gets everywhere. I really like anki so I use it a lot as it makes repetitive study easier. What I have been doing is running anki on my computer while writing down all the kanji on my iPad.
One of the annoyances with having a tablet is using a finger to write, which is why I recommend getting a pen that is made to write on tablets. While it doesn’t write with the precision I would want it to, it does do better than a finger (apple really fell down on pen support, and most other tablet/slate makers as well).
The Best Part of the Tablet
While having a tablet, and being able to write on it is a great tool, and I really enjoy it, the best part of being able to use it to write with is you have infinite pages to write on and deleting a page is a simple click. The great thing is you can read something, switch over to anki, add a card and switch back. While there is a bit of pain doing this, sometimes, its nice because it is all-in-one. You don’t have to carry around a whole bunch of materials everywhere, I used to care three or four books on average.
Conclusion
Of all the ways I have used technology to study I would honestly have to say the tablet has been the most useful thing I have used in a long time. The key thing is it doesn’t have to be an iPad, in fact I was thinking about getting another one as well. If you can lay down the money for a tablet, you can write on, do it for sure. You might even consider a kindle fire the little bit I played with it at the store it seems pretty good, if I didn’t feel bad for my kindle keyboard I would probably get the fire. A couple of my friends have the Galaxy Tab and like it a lot as well, so look at that too.
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I’ve been thinking about using the ipad too so that I can switch back and forth my pdf scans, anki and websites, even. The iphone is too small for me, in my opinion.
I’ve been using a (slightly antiquated) Dell X51V Axim for the last year and a half; I’ve been using it in exactly the same way. Mr. Peter Rivard at japaneselanguagetools.com sets these things up with locally installed WWWJDIC dictionaries, Eijiro, Daijiten, and several others. They’re a bit pricey, but I’d say these things still have the best support for Japanese among most any other handheld device, to include localized iPhones issued by SoftBank and whatnot.