blastrock
Kanji selection as a tree
the current selection interface makes it very hard to find a starting point to learn Kanji, with a highlight to the kanji composition lessons, where you need to have learned previous symbols to understand the ones selected, which is hard to find on the list.
would a tree of selection be easy to build? maybe dividing the current groups based on its level of complexity (i.e how deep the word mixing goes to a certain kanji) and have the program automatically select the relevant ones at the higher levels like a dependency management (with an option to disable, of course)? or perhaps a more complex and visual solution such as the trees of a skill tree that you would normally find in a videogame (i.e the most basic ones starting in a concentrated point at the center while the complex ones spread around and are connected by lines based on its connections in the writings)?
you and someone more can likely expand on this idea :p
what do you think? :3
sorry for taking so long to write this :( i should have written that sooner ;-;
I thought about something similar, not a tree but a list of levels where all kanji in level N depend on kanji on level N-1. In the end it gave very few levels, with one of them with 1k kanji or so, so I forgot about it.
The feature you propose would take some time, and as you have noticed, I am not working much on kakugo anymore, so it is unlikely that I implement it. However, there's the aedict app that has a feature where it shows all kanji that are composed by the selected kanji, it's not shown a tree but it's close enough. Jisho doesn't seem to have that feature though. Also aedict is not free... If you find another (free?) dictionary with that feature, please tell me.
Also, I would not recommend learning kanji in that particular order. This will make you learn a lot of rare kanji and miss on the most used ones, but that's just my opinion.
i think i didn't remember to write it earlier: in my case, because i intend to learn the language and maybe use it more in the long term, i do wish to learn the hard and rare parts if that makes the others easier to pick up, so i think it would be easier for me if i can tinker with and learn what can i merge with what and whatnot, and learning the base pieces would be important for this.
speaking of that, today i've learned about radicals, which are basically the base pieces that i was thinking of. if there was a way to make different groups of combinations of these, there could be a paralel kanji selection screen where you could choose the kanji based on depth and complexity — so no need for a literal tech-tree style interface, and much less replace the current, as it allows for people to just choose between different methods of learning ^^
but i think that all of this was what you said in the first paragraph ^^'
a solution that could be proposed would be to either split the 1k kanji level into the regular JLPT ones to make a clear path of what to look for first, or just keep these as-is if there aren't any more levels of depth and just implicitly tell people to move to JLPT once they are done or if they think they are overwhelmed.