Go to Charles Kelly's saliva-inducing Online Japanese Language Study Materials and click on the Daily Startup (Home) Page for Students of Japanese. Then go to the preferences menu of your browser and make this page your start up page. Assuming you don't just leave your computer on all the time (and my PowerBook does seem rather happy with its polyphasic sleep cycle) when you launch your browser in the morning you will be greeted by 36 kanji, sorted into 9 levels, from easy-as-pie to fiendishly difficult. There are 2414 kanji altogether, so bright sparks will notice that there are 467 extra fellows who aren't part of the 1945 Jōyō (general use) kanji 常用漢字. Kelly explains that he made up the list by reference to whether the kanji was marked as an EDICT Priority Word or appeared at least 3 times in a newspaper word frequency list he maintains. Move the cursor over a kanji to reveal the reading, meaning and a sample kanji compound. Click on the kanji for a more comprehensive list of compounds plus some external links to sites with flashcard resources etc. The page is perfect for any level - beginners can stick with just doing the 4 kanji from the easiest level each day while keen beans can do battle with all 36 characters, confident that by going above and beyond the Jōyō kanji they will be covering a lot of the discretionary JLPT Level 1 kanji. 67 days and you can go through them all again!
Tags kanji | learning Japanese | study Japanese
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