iKanji touch 1.7 – whats new?

This is quite a big update to iKanji touch so lets look at what’s new:

Kana Chart

$0.99 / £0.69 / 0.89€ in app purchase

If you ever find yourself stumped looking kanji readings trying to remember if that’s a tsu or a shi or perhaps a re or a ne, the kana chart may come in handy. With a full alphabetical listing of all the hiragana and katakana characters with romaji.

Kanji Writing Practice

$0.99 / £0.69 / 0.89€ in app purchase

Have you ever wanted to just practice writing a kanji over and over until it sinks in? The Kanji Writing Practice feature offers just that. Watch the on-screen stroke animation or just work from memory. If you find it a little tricky using your finger to write the more complex kanji then a stylus, such as the Wacom Bamboo Stylus, works great. The first seven writing squares offer a guide to trace, after that you’ll need to draw it from scratch. iKanji touch automatically progresses you to the next square after you’ve drawn the correct number of strokes. You can also tap any of the squares to view what you’ve previously drawn.

If you enjoy writing kanji on your iPhone please have a look at iKana Nōto for the iPad which takes the concept to the next level.

Other changes and updates

These features and fixes are free to all users:

• A common complaint I hear from users is that the writing test is too unforgiving. If you’re training while commuting and hit a bump which makes you miss a stroke then you lose all your training progress for the kanji, which isn’t much fun. In version 1.7, iKanji touch now lets you make two mistakes before marking an answer as wrong. Hopefully this is a fair balance between making things too easy and forgiving accidental input. I’ve also increased the size of the touch zones accepted so your chances of missing them is reduced.
• iKanji touch finally has stroke animations for all jōyō kanji including the 196 new kanji introduced in 2010! It’s taken a long time to get all the animations done but I’m happy to finally be able to offer such a complete set. There are still some missing for the more obscure kanji in the JLPT sets (mostly name kanji) but I hope to have those finished next year.
• BLEEP! It can be embarrassing if your phone makes a loud noise while you’re using iKanji touch. However you might not want to silence your phone or turn the ringer volume right down. Version 1.7 adds a volume control to the setting screen so you can make the sound effects as quiet or loud as you like.
• iKanji touch 1.7 also sports an updated icon to match the new version of iKana touch released recently. I hope you like it 🙂
• I’ve made some further improvements to VoiceOver support for browsing kanji. Unfortunately the Japanese voice quality on iOS is pretty poor compared to English, but it’s still better than nothing.