Yesterday I enjoyed a great post-work Japanese session with P over coffee (ok…オケ…okay…おけ…OK…I had a piece of tiffin and actually an Irn Bru).
One of the things we looked at was a reading exercise which locksleyu posted on his blog that is absolutely superb. Check it out here.
Another thing we did in the session was use flashcards to revise kanji knowledge.

One of the ways we use cards like this is to test each other and sort them into piles:
- “100% know it 😎”
- “Would like more practice…🤔”
- “Oops! I think I forgot it! 😬”
The kanji in the header image are those from today’s session that we didn’t 100% know. Writing these here will help me not to forget them:
南
(なん), (な), (みなみ)
“nan”, “na”, “minami”
south
来
(らい), (く・る), (きた・る), (きた・す)
“rai”, “kuru”, “kitaru”, “kitasu”
come, coming, arrive, come to
道
(どう/とう), (みち)
“dō/tō”, “michi”
way, path, road, way of moral conduct
生
(せい), (しょう), (い・くる), (う・まれる), (お・う), (なま)
“”sei”, “shō”, “ikuru”, “umareru”, “ō”, “nama”
life, birth, grow, raw, existence
書
(しょ), (か・く)
“shō”, “kaku”
write, writing, book
読
(どく), (とく), (とう), (よ・む)
“doku”, “toku”, “tō”, “yomu”
read
時
(じ), (とき)
“ji”, “toki”
time, hour, o’clock
西
(せい), (さい), (にし)
“sei”, “sai”, “nishi”
west
校
(こう)
“kō”
school, proofread, collate
店
(てん), (みせ)
“ten”, “mise”
store, shop, place of business
魚
(ぎょ), (うお), (さかな)
“gyo”, “uo”, “sakana”
fish
社
(しゃ), (やしろ)
“sha”, “yashiro”
company, firm
先
(せん), (さき)
“sen”, “saki”
ahead, before, previous, precede
古
(こ), (ふる・い), (ふる・す)
“ko”, “furui”, “furusu”
old, ancient
間
(かん), (けん), (), (あいだ), (ま)
“kan”, “ken”, “aida”, “ma”
interval, between, space
聞
(ぶん), (もん), (き・く), (き・こえる)
“bun”, “mon”, “kiku”, “kikoeru”
hear, hear of, learn of
年
(ねん), (とし)
“nen”, “toshi”
year
千
(せん), (ち)
“sen”, “chi”
thousand
立
(りつ), (りゅう), (た・つ), (た・てる)
“ritsu”, “ryū”, “tatsu”, “tateru”
stand, stand up, establish, set up, erect
The above translations came from the meanings printed on the cards. With kanji, the surrounding characters often dictate how the word is pronounced so it can be difficult to give a comprehensive translation of a single character.
Attentive readers will notice I skipped a day, but that gives us all a chance to catch up ね? 😉
Thanks for the links!
Practice with kanji cards is something I haven’t done in a long time…but I am actually thinking of buying some soon in order to help a student of mine. Those White Rabbit Press ones look pretty cool.
A few comments/questions if you don’t mind:
1) Your featured image of kanji is really mangled by the reader view in the iOS WordPress app (on an iPhone). It cuts vertically though two rows of Kanjis and looks really…not pretty (:
2) Near the end you said “teru” when I think you meant to say “tateru”.
3) Did you put in all the readings from the cards or omit some? I was surprised since for some words there are the readings for both in compounds and by itself (道), whereas for others there is just the in-verb reading (生きる、書く). Whether it’s on the cards or not, I think learning readings like “sei” for 生 and “sho” for 書 are important. Actually, I would argue the non-verb compound readings (ex: 生物) are actually more common that the in-verb readings (ex: 生きる)
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Thank you! This feedback is great! 😀
Oh…barf! That’s super annoying. I’m not sure there’s much I can do about this. I was hoping that using phone preview mode would show me what you’re describing and I could fix it but in all the preview modes I have access to the image looks correct. This is something I will keep my eye on and when I have access to other devices for viewing the blog I will check that reality matches what the previews tell me, fixing where possible, but for now I think I’ll have to leave it as is.
So I did. Fixed! Thanks! Loooong week XD
I didn’t put in all the readings from the cards but I have fixed it now. On these cards they give two rows: for “on” and “kun” readings, the first being in katakana. The fact that it is in katakana throws me off as it makes me feel it’s a loan word reading (even though I know that katakana works more subtly than that) and so that made me reluctant to include them all here. Now I realise I was being foolish about that and have added them. However, I did convert katakana to hiragana since it still seems unnatural to me to write a reading like that in katakana, but I suppose the point is that they are stressing the phoneticism or the fact that it is a Chinese-derived meaning…or something like that
Maybe I should be writing them in katakana anyway…
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