Why not type Japanese reading

Like Chinese does for pinyin?

Japanese has kana to represent the sounds (which is already built into the Android app), so writing prompts sort of accomplish this, with the exception of words written in kanji where that is used instead. I think writing kana is also easier than typing, especially on mobile devices.

I could see it being useful where if banning a writing, it would ask if you would like to ban the whole word writing itself, or instead ban the kanji writing from the word so it would prompt for all kana. For instance, say you press ban for the word 薔薇, select “ban kanji from writing” opposed to “ban word writing”, and the next time the word writing comes up it shows 薔薇 in the reading field (where it would normally say ばら), and instead prompts you to write ばら instead of 薔薇. @josh What are your thoughts?

@DobbsBob How would you see this working? Would you see the user typing romaji or kana?

Right now the ability to type pinyin is only available on the website, both mobile clients (Android and iOS) don’t support it as typing on the mobile keyboard is a bit cumbersome. Android has a beta feature for allowing users to enable writing kana contained in words and that features is expected to make it onto the website and iOS in the future.

This is something I wondered since using Memrise for some vocab. It takes romaji or kana input (latter is preferable ofc). I might just be imagining it, but typing the words seems to help them stick better.

I’m thinking of input for readings, not writings, in the web client, as Chinese does for pinyin. Writing kana could work, but wouldn’t that be redundant after learning them? I type kana about as easily as anything, and can’t imagine writing with mouse would be as fast. Then again, that would require switching the right hand a lot, unlike Memrise which has no writing…I didn’t think of this probably because I do writing reviews on phone (my mouse is wonky).

oh yeah, @Jeremy, I stopped getting that iOS Writing Prompt for No-Kanji Words bug I reported a couple months back. It took a while after clearing the local data, so I’m not sure if that did the trick.

It’s certainly something we’ll keep in mind. @Jeremy pointed out a javascript library awhile back (http://wanakana.com/) that could possibly help bridge the gap in the future.