About Kanjijump
How is Kanjijump different from ______?
The idea of learning the kanji via mnemonic keywords + component breakdowns is nothing new. Numerous comparable kanji-learning systems have popped up over the years in the form of books like Forster and Tamura's Kanji ABC, De Roo's 2001 Kanji, and, most notably, Heisig's Remembering the Kanji.
Kanjijump was born out of my personal yearning for a similar resource that:
- takes advantage of modern technology.
Seriously, who can be bothered to look up a kanji in a dead-tree book these days? - tells the real story of the characters' ancient origins.
In particular, Heisig's Remembering the Kanji can get pretty silly in its choices for component keywords. You can argue that this makes for interesting mnemonic devices. But if you ask me, the real stories of the kanji are way more interesting than the stories Heisig makes up. Kanjijump isn't above the occasional silly mnemonic device, but it also makes room for actual etymology.
Besides those key differences, Kanjijump is more of a reference work than a course of study. The authors of Remembering the Kanji and Kanji ABC recommend you power through their books and memorize a list of 2,000 kanji in their proprietary order. I know from experience that I don't have the sheer willpower it takes to memorize 2,000 characters out of context, so I'll hold off from making such recommendations here. 🙂
Instead of a list to memorize, I present you with the same information and tools that have helped me the most on my own continuing kanji journey.
Contact
Kanjijump is a little passion project of mine. If you spot any errors, or have any other kinds of feedback for me, please feel free to reach out on Twitter (@justinsilvestre) or send an email to kanjijump@protonmail.com.
Sources
Kanjijump was made possible thanks to the following projects.
The Kanji Database Project
Graphical decomposition data for the kanji and etymological data are based on the Kanji Database Project's ids.txt and ids-analysis.txt respectively. These in turn are based on data from the CHISE IDS project, which is under the GNU General Public License 2.0. The source for Kanjijump's modified version can be found on Github.
Dmitry Shpika's kanji frequency data
Character usage frequency data is taken from Github user scriptin's "kanji-frequency" repository where it is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The frequency data used on Kanjijump is based on the Aozora Bunko library.
The Unihan Database
Character variants data and some character readings data are taken from the Unihan Database, and used in conformance with the Unicode's terms of use.
The KANJIDIC Project
Some character readings data was taken from dictionary files by the KANJIDIC project, which are released under the Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Wiktionary
Data for Middle Chinese readings and associated Lua scripts were taken from Wiktionary, in accordance with their Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-ShareAlike License. The source for Kanjijump's modified versions can be found on Github.
GlyphWiki
Kanjijump makes use of the free Hanazono Mincho font from GlyphWiki, in conformance with GlyphWiki's license