Given a list of kanji that you wish to practice recognition on, and a Japanese text to practice with, this web app asks you to find all kanji you ought to recognize, and optionally to enter their English keywords (from James Heisig's Remembering the Kanji).

The list of kanji you know can come from entering the number of kanji you've learned using Heisig's Remembering the Kanji volumes 1 and 3 books, or by pasting a list of kanji. For the former, Katsuo's multi-edition spreadsheet of kanji and Heisig keywords can help cross-reference your edition with the sixth edition of volume 1 and third edition of volume 3, which are used here.

Test it out at http://fasiha.github.io/kanjiwild/.

Heisig emphasizes the importance of practicing going from the English keyword to the Japanese kanji, and if you’ve been following that advice, you’ve instructed your spaced repetition software to only quiz you on producing kanji as output. I’ve found that it is also beneficial to practice the reverse, especially “organically”, that is, by scanning native Japanese text for kanji one recognizes and producing the English keyword.

This tool’s expected workflow is finding some interesting Japanese text (may I suggest an unabridged online edition of Sōseki Natsume's Botchan),copying and pasting a few paragraphs here, and then entering the kanji one recognizes along with their Heisig keywords. The tool will tell you how many you ought to know and gives immediate visual feedback on how many you have correct.

James Heisig and the University of Hawaiʻi Press, as the author and publisher of Remembering the Kanji, have copyrights on the English keywords. These are included here without permission in data.js. Any use of this tool requires licensing from James Heisig or his publisher.

This tool is heavily indebted to the D3.js, underscore.js, XRegExp, and PureCSS projects.

The software portions of this tool are released by Ahmed Fasih into the public domain. See LICENSE.