Adding Kanji primes

Hi,

I was wondering why there’s only “Add to learned” for Kanji primes. Wouldn’t it be didactically useful to be able to review them, too, similar to Kanji themselves?

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Hello! Sorry for the late reply, my daughter was recently born so I have had to step away from work on uchisen for a while. But I’m back!

This is something I’ve put thought into for a bit. During my own study, I’ve talked to my spouse (who is Japanese) about radicals/primes as if they were kanji with meanings on their own, which most of them aren’t. The last thing I want is for users of uchisen confusing Primes for actual Kanji, and writing a Prime as if it were a real Kanji with that meaning (I hope this makes sense).

My thought is to just treat Primes as temporary crutches to use until the actual kanji they appear in are memorized, and not something that people spend time memorizing in the long term.

That’s a great question, though, and I’m not saying it’s something I’m not open to changing, but something I feel comfortable about at the moment.

I agree with you that radicals and Kanji shouldn’t be confused. But since the former are useful to learn many Kanji’s I think being able to memorize their meaning through spaced repetition would be a useful feature. Perhaps confusion could be avoided by keeping Kanji and radicals in separate sections (like the Kanji study app does, for example) in addition to using different colors?

That’s a good idea, I’ll explore what that could be. I wouldn’t be against adding some kind of review for primes as a separate thing, so I’ll think about it and see where it could fit and what it might look like.