You can now choose to do your SRS reviews from the kanji to the keyword (kanji first).

You will find the option in the Spaced Repetition Settings page:

In addition to the SRS setting, I also fixed the links at the top of this page to go to the relevant section of the documentation.

If you'd like to comment or make further suggestions see Kanji to Keyword option for SRS #272 on github . The matching issue is #268.

Until now the website has adhered strictly to James Heisig's recommendation - quoting from the Lesson 11 introduction :

If you try to shortcut the process by merely learning to recognize the characters for their meaning without worrying about their writing, you will find that you have missed one bird with two stones, when you could have bagged two with one. Let me repeat: study only from key word to kanji; the reverse will take care of itself.

With that said, I get emails now and then from users who would prefer to review from the kanji first.

One good argument I've received, is that after you have completed RTK and you are satisfied with your knowledge of the characters and their parts (primitives / radicals), you might want to focus on recognition instead.

Which brings to mind another good reason for this update : there's quite a few users out there who do not in fact use RTK but find the website useful. The website is quite malleable in how you use it whether you want to use the Restudy list or just skip it altogether with the "Again" rating - whether you want to use the default keywords or even change them for Japanese words - it's up to you.

Up next

I plan to work on #267 - Add a way to jump between kanji without remembering the keyword or number in study page.

This suggestion is actually two connected features that I could be looking at. The reason I'm tempted to prioritize these is that they are realtively "self contained" improvements to the UX on the Study pages - which has no wide ripple effects in the codebase.

Those are features that can be fun to work on, and completed in a shorter time frame , without having to do a lot of refactoring on the side. This is good as it gives me some motivational boost and helps keep the ball rolling - as it's always a little daunting to get back into the code after a break - code which I may have written one year ago, or even ten years ago! (o_O)

So, the two connected features may be:

1. some kind of "last viewed kanji" list on the sidebar - perhaps only for desktop view - could make it quicker and simpler to navigate back and forth between related kanji. The sidebar is relatively empty on desktop so it could be a good fit there.

2. a button next to the search box, that looks a bit like those "hamburger menu" buttons, that would open a popup with a kanji grid where you can simply pick a kanji from the current lesson, and maybe the lesson before and after. I'll have to experiment. If the area is scrollable we could potentially display the entire RTK set; however there is a point where it will be less useful to scan such a large grid of kanji vs just using the search box.

   This grid of kanji won't have space for keywords , so it's more of a way to visually jump between characters of the lesson you're working on I suppose. As is often the case with those UX improvements - it sounds good on paper but I really have to make a basic implementation to see how useful / usable it is.

It's good to be spending some time again on the code! Now matter how frustrating "front end development" can be these days - I still enjoy being able to tinker on the full "stack" from php to css to javascript to even the wireframe/mockups in FIGMA.

Your feedback is welcome via the contact form as well as the discussions forum on github!