Keith's day 1

Today is the first day of the 2009 Kanji Challenge. How are you doing? Here's how my day went.

Looking at my list of the Kanji numbers, I have 44 rows on a page, so I decided it would be easier to keep track of how far I need to work down my list by just doing one column a day. So that means I'm going to try to do 44 a day.

First I looked up each character in Kanji in Context because this is the book I used when I went through them to determine which characters I need to study. Then I figured the only way I'm going to be able to review the words for these characters all day is by having them together because I can't look them up every time. So I decided to use a quiz web page that I created a couple of years ago. It uses javascript and php to read a list from a file and create a random order quiz. Basically a flashcard quiz.

In my quiz file, I put two types of question. The first type shows the Kanji word and the answer is the reading in Hiragana. I'm using the first word listed for the Kanji in Kanji in Context. This question type will ensure that I am learning (at least for today) how to read new words.

The second type of question I have created shows just one character and the answer is that vocabulary word I am reading. With this type, I am forced to take a better look at the character since it is by itself. With the other type of question, I could just be able to read the word because of the accompanying Kanji or Okurigana without really noticing the target character.

I would like to have a third type where I need to choose the correct character from similar-looking Kanji, but that would take a lot of effort to create. Just typing in the 44 characters and a single word for each into a text file took a lot of time and was rather tiring. I had to take a break after entering the first 10 of them.

Not all of the characters from my first group are completely unknown characters but I included them even if I sort of knew them because I felt my recognition was too weak. I couldn't be sure if it was the character I was thinking it was and I would probably have to check to confirm it if I found it in something I read.

Here are the characters I studied today:
怒逃屈封筒賛達損懸尊導倫輸往芝皇聖禅嫁婿飾設施濃富紀素徳航慢養善需延即償散敷酔軒郡弾弓矢