Questions and Answers

Overview

Scope

• Which kanji will I learn from Kanji Bee?
• How many kanji will Kanji Bee eventually include?

Beta kanji

• What does it mean that a kanji is in beta status?
• How do I opt-in to learn beta kanji?
• Should I learn kanji in beta status?

Reviews

• What is a review unit?

Which kanji will I learn from Kanji Bee?

Kanji Bee currently (version 1.5) includes 250 or 486 kanji, depending on whether you chose to learn beta kanji or not.

The 250 kanji make up levels 1 to 10 in our own suggested learning order:

The following kanji are in beta status:

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A common way to learn kanji is by following the order used in Japanese elementary schools. The following table shows the number of kanji learnt in each grade and the proportion of those that are currently available in Kanji Bee.

If you choose to include beta kanji, the coverage is as follows.

How many kanji will Kanji Bee eventually include?

We plan to include all Jōyō kanji which add up to 2136. This is the collection of kanji that a Japanese child learns if they finish high school.

For reference, please refer to the following table:

Kyōiku kanji are the characters taught in elementary school. Jinmeiyō kanji are additional characters which are allowed to be used in personal names.

A very well-read Japanese person may know around 5000 characters but the Jōyō kanji list is enough to read most newspapers, magazines, and websites. If a kanji outside the Jōyō list appears in print it is usually accompanied by furigana.

What does it mean that a kanji is in beta status?

Learning data for the kanji, i.e.

• which readings to learn,
• which meanings to memorize,
• which vocabulary to prioritize, and
• what additional information to include,

has been carefully selected, but it has not yet been checked by a native speeker.

See also Should I learn kanji in beta status?

How do I opt-in to learn beta kanji?

In the app, go to Settings and turn on Learn Kanji in Beta Status .

Should I learn kanji in beta status?

To help you decide, let’s take a look at the final quality control for Kanji Bee level 6. The revisions made here are fairly typical. 5-10 % of the review items are usually affected, and the changes are mostly minor.

Eventually, a new version of the app will replace beta data with the final data. All items that have been deleted or replaced will from now on be ignored by the app, even if you have spent time learning and reviewing them. All review items that are new, or have replaced a previous one, will have to be learnt from scratch.

Meanings

The following changes were made:

There were no changes to the other 21 kanji in level 6.

Readings

Our language expert made some changes to the example words used when introducing the readings but these changes did not affect the review items.

Vocabulary

The following changes were made:

Also, a note was added for the word 全く, explaining that it is mainly used in negative sentences.

The remaining 91 words introduced in level 6 were left unchanged.

What is a review unit?

When you open the app you are informed of the number of due review units. What does this concept mean?

A review unit is a piece of information that you learn, or an ability that you acquire, that we want to test your mastery of using the spaced repetition method.

Here are three examples of review units:

1. the ability to recognize the kanji 曜
2. knowing that the kanji 曜 means day of the week
3. knowing that the word 月曜日 is read げつようび

A review unit roughly corresponds to what is known as a card in traditional spaced repetition systems (manual or computer-aided). These systems typically have a single type of exercise to test a user’s knowledge: Show the front side of a card and let the user answer the question there, then check the back side to see if they were correct.

+----------+ 0..n          1 +-------------+
| exercise |-----------------| card        |
+----------+     tests ->    +-------------+

Figure 1  Traditional spaced repetition systems

Kanji Bee uses several types of exercises, and one exercise may test several review units at the same time. As an example, let’s say that we have an exercise where the user is given the reading げつようび and the meaning Monday. They are then asked to form a word (月曜日) by picking kanji from a given selection. This exercise would test all of review units 1-3 above (to varying degrees).

  +--------------+ 0..n       1..n +--------------+
  |   exercise   |-----------------| review unit  |
  +--------------+     tests ->    +--------------+
   /H\       /H\                    /H\       /H\
    H         H                      H         H
    H         H                      H         H
+-----+     +-----+              +-----+     +-----+
|     | ... |     |              |     | ... |     |
+-----+     +-----+              +-----+     +-----+

Figure 2  Kanji Bee

This is the reason why the review unit count can decrease by more than one when you complete a single review exercise.