The API contract between your hand, the dictionary, and the OCR engine
Stroke order is taught as etiquette. Draw the strokes out of order and sensei frowns. That framing is wrong.
Stroke order is t...
The feature hiding in plain sight
Tokyo Japanesehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyodialect is a pitchaccent languagehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanesepitchaccent. Every word carries either a si...
Most kanji are not pictures. They are spellings.
The single most useful fact about kanji: roughly four in five are phonosemantic compoundshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinesecharacterclassificatio...
Japanese grammar looks vast from outside and small from inside. The trick is to find the small set of design choices that generate the rest, then derive everything from there.
Three properties do a...
The ROI of your first 100 characters
100 kanji sounds like rounding error against the 2,136character joyohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8Dkanji set. It is not. The frequency distribution...
The scheduler is the whole game
A card appears. You answer. The app picks the next interval — tomorrow, next week, three months from now. That single decision is the product. Get it right and you k...
Not one Chinese — four
On'yomi is "the Chinese reading." Kun'yomi is "the Japanese reading." Technically true, and it papers over the interesting bit: on'yomi is not one layer. It's four. Four borr...
Kanji Is an Information Technology
The character 鬱/kanjis/9b31 depression encodes in one glyph what English spells out in ten letters and 29 strokes. That is not calligraphic trivia. It is an engin...
The shelf, honestly benchmarked
Most Western learners' kanji shelves end the same way — a halfread Heisig, a Genki, a dictionary used twice. The Japanese scholarly shelf is a different artifact. De...
The empirical case for structured kanji study
2,136 joyo kanjihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C5%8Dy%C5%8Dkanji is not a willpower problem. It is a scheduling, encoding, and retrieval problem — and...
Third in the world at reading — while carrying the heaviest script
Japan scored 516 on PISA 2022 readinghttps://www.oecd.org/pisa/ — third globally — while asking every child to internalize the mos...
Kanji are a compression algorithm
Unicode's CJK Unified Ideographs block encodes 97,680 characters. The KanjiJumphttps://www.kanjijump.com/browse/atomic decomposition reduces the 3,500 mostused Jap...