What am I doing here?
I have spent a lot of time studying Japanese, which is another way of saying I have looked at a hell of a lot of Japanese character flashcards. Flashcards are inherently two-dimensional in that they have a back and a front. Japanese characters have many dimensions to them (the character itself, its meanings, its readings, and more). In other words, kanji and flash cards are not really compatible. It always bothered me that I could not easily isolate one aspect of a character for study. Why should I be forced to see the reading and the meaning for a kanji at the same time? I shouldn’t! Do I need a flash pyramid, or a flash cube? Or in the case of the dreaded 生, some kind of horrible eldritch flash icosahedron? That seems extremely impractical. For many years, I have lived with the terrible conundrum of having my beautiful, complex kanji forced into binary groupings by the oppressive, inflexible nature of flash cards. And if there’s one thing sane people can agree on, it’s that being for...