We had to take the site down today to put updates up (sorry!!) and like a lot of things, it’s taking way longer than we thought. So, we’re going to put the site back up with the updates partially done, and over the next few days we should be able to get everything squared away and finished. Depending on what you’re studying, you may or may not get affected by the updates as they’re going up, so here’s a summary of what’s changing so you can get a good idea.
Updates That Might Affect You
Like I said, depending on what you’re studying and working on, the updates may or may not affect you. The main things that need watching out for are the kanji / radicals section. It’s also the areas I was trying to get ready for today’s update. Although most of it was ready, I ran into a lot of road blocks that slowed down getting everything out of a spreadsheet and onto TextFugu, so the updates will keep on rolling (and hopefully be done by this weekend, or early next week). First, I’ll go over changes at the same time as I go over how it might affect you.
Radicals Page
There’s a Radicals Page that contains all the radicals now. The Kanji menu before just didn’t make sense, and it was hard to find what you needed to find. Now all radicals are on one page. Even better, if you click on a radical it will take you to a radical page for that radical (which never existed before). On the page is the mnemonic for the radical as well as a list of kanji the radical is used in, in case you’re interested.
Change #1: Only the radicals you need for the next set of kanji are present. I’ve taken out any radicals not used until right before you need to use them. That way they’ll be fresher in your brain, and you won’t have to learn any radicals you don’t need right away. Just more efficient and will help you to learn radicals faster and kanji better.
Change #2: There are some new radicals as well. As I went through kanji, I kept finding more and more things I wish I had made as radicals, but it was hard to go back. This was my chance. There’s a bunch of new radicals in there. I’d recommend going through and reading through them. It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes or so if you just read and look. Radicals aren’t too hard to remember, right? It’s the kanji that gets nassttty, I think.
Change #3: Some radical names have changed (sorry!). I made some mistakes on naming previous radicals in the past. I just didn’t have enough experience with them and didn’t know enough how they would effect future things. But now I know, so now I want to make sure each radical is more memorable. I’ve changed out radicals with long names (super sweet water slide is just a water slide now), I’ve changed radical names that were too similar to other radical names (upside down box, knocked over box, knocked over broken box, box, etc., is just ridiculous. They all have very different names now), and I’ve changed most names that aren’t nouns (i.e. things) because things make for way better mnemonics once you have to use them with kanji. I’d look through the Radicals page and see what looks different for you, and click on those ones and read the mnemonic to remember them. Really sorry for making you re-learn some radicals, but in the long term it will really, really help with kanji learning.
As for what might affect you – it’s the above things, and also the Anki decks for the radicals. I’ll have the new decks up probably tomorrow, or maybe even later tonight. I’ll let you know in the updates section of the dashboard where you can find these Anki downloads soon, so check there please!
Kanji Page
Kanji also gets its own page, like the radicals. It makes it a lot easier to find kanji and see where you’re at, in the grand scheme of things. This is the section that is the least complete in terms of the updates, and the part I’d recommend staying away from if you’re anywhere above 3-strokes (for a couple days, at least). Here’s what’s going on.
Change #1: Kanji has its own page – although lessons will suggest what kanji to learn before moving on (since lessons use kanji in the example sentences, etc., based off these “suggestions”), the kanji page itself is going to be more standalone (if you want it to be). Instead of having to go to a stroke’s page or having to dig around to find what you’re looking for, everything’s in one place. If you want to find something, I’d recommend doing ctrl+f or cmd+f and searching the page that way.
Change #2: A lot of the mnemonics for kanji and kanji reading are getting changed, either because the mnemonics could be better (I’ve gotten better at coming up with mnemonics I think, so the older kanji mnemonics could stand some improvements) or because the radical changed and so the mnemonic has to change. The thing about kanji mnemonics, though, is if something worked for you, you don’t have to learn a new mnemonic, because the important thing is you know the kanji. If a mnemonic didn’t work for you, then you may have a better mnemonic to use now that will actually help you to remember the kanji / reading of the kanji!
Change #3: There’s been a lot of visual / interface changes on the kanji pages too. Just go look at any kanji 3-stroke or below to see. In terms of content changes I’m now listing the radicals that make up the kanji with links to their respective radical pages, just in case you need to remember a radical. Also, vocab are getting mnemonics / pointers for how to learn them. More on that in the next section of this post.
Basically, though, here’s the deal. I’ll need another couple days to get all the kanji pages updated. One more bad news, too – I had to backtrack on 7-stroke kanji for a little bit, because of the new way kanji’s set up and organized. I have to finish all of the kanji in a section before I put them up, so this will change how kanji gets updated and added on the site. Good news is probably next week all the 7-stroke kanji will be added up, so even though you lose around forty 7-stroke kanji for a week, you’ll get around 100 next week with most of them being totally new. At least, that’s the plan.
As for Anki decks, there’s a new Kanji Anki Deck set that I’ll probably put up tomorrow. It’s a lot more simplified from the current deck, and although some fields are now going to be gone, I think it’s an overall better experience in terms of how it’s supposed to work. I’m sure I’ll hear from you if you hate it, though ;) Expect that tomorrowish.
Vocab Page
Vocab page is the least finished of the three main new content-related sections, but it’s also the newest. Vocab’s hard, and people email me telling me it’s hard, and I know it’s hard… Vocab’s really the only really abstract thing you have to learn on TextFugu. There’s not much there to help you with it, and that sucks, I think. So, I’ve been working on fixing this so even vocab is more of a pleasure.
Change #1: Vocab has its own page. You can see what kanji spawned this vocab, too (though not yet, I’ll be adding that in next week).
Change #2: On an individual kanji’s page, each vocab word will have 2 or 3 sections below it, to help you remember. There will be “Combo” (to show you what two+ kanji make up the word), “Meaning” (a hint to help you to learn the meaning of the vocab word) and “Reading” (a hint to help you learn the reading of the vocab word). Even though vocab will always remain difficult, I think this new section appended to each vocab in the kanji pages will really help ease a lot of the pain – then you can focus on learning more, rather than struggling and getting overwhelmed with vocabulary.
Change #3: I’ve decided to strip out any vocab you aren’t learning at that moment from kanji pages. I can see how it might be useful, but at the same time, I want people to focus on things that aren’t abstract. I think it will help people to progress more quickly and with fewer distractions. All those words will come up eventually, but not until you know all the kanji that reside within a given word.
Vocab’s the main thing that’s slowing things down, but I’m adding in vocab mnemonics / hints as the kanji pages get updated with the new mnemonics as well. Same as kanji, vocab (at this point) has only been updated up to 3-stroke kanji, but over the next few days I should finish up to 6-stroke with the new vocab stuff. Figure it’s best to do this rather than keep the site down, yeah? :)
Updates That Probably Won’t Affect You
Hashi’s been working on the design side of the updates (and sometimes tagging Viet in too), and there’ll continue to be updates for the design in the coming week that we didn’t quite get done yet. There’s lots of fixes and little alterations that will happen tonight, tomorrow, and the next day, but hopefully it won’t prevent you from studying and learning. There’s probably more than this, but here’s the things I can think of that will be changed around in the very near future.
- Dashboard (Why’s it so boring??)
- Table Of Contents (A little bit of fine tuning is in order)
- New About Page (currently not up)
- Updated FAQ Page (it’s sort of out of date).
- And probably a bunch of other things I don’t know about / am forgetting
Anyways, I don’t really know what goes on in this area. I just nod my head and pretend, but I’m sure there’s fantastic things happening. Of course, other things have already changed. Like the table of contents has its own page now (no more drop down menu that breaks for half the people out there), and kanji/radicals has its own section as well. We’ll be making tweaks, but the big stuff is there.
So, be nice to us for a couple days at least. Lots of things will be fixed and changed (hopefully for the better) and we’ll keep you updated as to what those things are as we do it, so you’re not in the dark. Follow us on Twitter to get all the deets, or just keep an eye on the blog (here) or your dashboard (here).
Roundup
Just a quick roundup, in case you forgot:
- Individual radicals now have their own individual pages.
- There’s new radicals and changes to current radicals to make them more unique and memorable (better for learning kanji)
- Individual kanji are getting mnemonic upgrades, either because mnemonics got better or because radicals got changed.
- Kanji after 3-stroke (that’s 4-stroke and up) isn’t quite ready for use yet. You probably can use it, but it’s not going to be finished updating for a few more days.
- Vocab got better – updates have and will have better ways to study vocab.
- Kanji and Radicals will be getting new Anki decks tomorrow, most likely.
- Visual updates also happening over the next few days, but I don’t really know what’s going on here because I’m making someone else do it (I know how much you hate it when I work on design… content content content, yeah??).
- Give us a few days before you barrage us with broken things – we already have a big list of things that need to be fixed and worked on, though we hope the site works pretty good for you right now. It’ll get better in the next couple days, promise!
I think that’s everything – so sorry again for the downtime to work on these updates. Big updates like this never go to plan, even with three people working on them day and night day and night weeks before launch day :( For the stuff that’s up right now, I hope you enjoy it, for the stuff that’s not up but going to be up the next few days, I hope you look forward to it! After this, I’ll be able to get back to more of a normal update routine… one that doesn’t require thousands of kanji, radicals, and vocab spreadsheet entries, I hope!