Kanji Reading Series Pause and Rework

Hey! 

It’s been a while since I wrote an announcement here. Here in Nagano, Japan things are finally starting to warm up a bit, and the Sakura blossoms are a week or two away from blossoming. 2024 is looking up. 

We’ve been working hard on releasing the N5 Kanji Word Reading video series. Since releasing the Anki deck I’ve noticed that many students struggle when they reach the sentence cards. Now that I’m creating the videos I can see why. We didn’t spend enough time choosing an ORDER for the words in this part of the series. We put most of our effort into getting the MEANINGS and WRITING part of the series perfect, but not enough time working on the student experience for the word section. That resulted in the jump in level from the Meanings series to the Reading series being too steep. 

I’ve decided to go back and rectify this. While I want to continue getting out new content as quickly as possible for those of you waiting, I also know that a series like this might be used for decades, so I want to make sure it is done RIGHT. I don’t want it to be “a kanji series” I want it to be “the BEST kanji series.” 

So we’re going back. We will add new words, reorder all the old ones, and simplify the sentences that appear earliest in the series so that the jump from the Meanings and Writing series into the Reading Words series is less jarring.

We are going to attempt to edit the existing Anki cards in such a way that we can release an update for the current Anki deck that will seamlessly update the cards you have, and add new ones into your CURRENT deck so that those of you who are already using it will not lose your progress.

In tandem, we are working on the N4 Kanji deck, and a normal N5 vocabulary deck with close to 900 vocabulary words. I intend to release the update for the N5 kanji deck AND the N5 Vocabulary deck at the same time. 

With this in mind, we will PAUSE the YouTube Kanji Reading series, and RESTART it from Lesson 1 with the new material right around when we release the new decks. 

If things go according to plan, we will release the N4 kanji deck shortly after that. For those of you who have been waiting for that, I’m sorry! We’re trying to make it as useful as possible, and as with most things, it takes WAY longer than expected. 😭

With that said, we will be CONTINUING to live stream every week, at the same time and day. On week 1, we’re going to be doing a Skribbl.io quiz using the 118 kanji that we learned in Part 1 of the kanji series. We might even play a game or something. Please come hang out tomorrow to see what the first one will be like!

Thank you all for your continued support, and please let us know if you have any questions in the comments here if you are a member of the Discord: Discord Thread about Announcement

Or HERE if you are a member of this website: Kanji Lesson 3 Comments Section

また次のビデオで会いましょうね！

P.S. Lesson 3 and 4 will be available on ToKiniAndy.com ONLY, and all YouTube videos will be unlisted for the READING series.