The currently selected vocab in the Dictionary should have a yellow star, indicating the user's choice. This lets you know which one to click / tap, if you want to remove it (it works like a toggle). With yesterday's udate, the yellow star did not show. This is now fixed.

To clear up any confusion since this came up: the vocab selection does not work in the Study page. This is intentional. It makes sense to enable it at some point.

Today's update brings improvements to the Dictionary, both on Study and Review pages.

• Tweaked visuals (looks a bit nicer, screenshot)
• The kanji reading is now highlighted in all the results of the dictionary! (except special readings such as "たばこ" 煙草 -- in which case there is no highlighted portion)
• Increased font size of the kanji & kana in the Dictionary list for legibility
• Switched highlighted reading style back to red underlined text (which I think is less distracting when reading the entire word, also may help color blind users)
• Performance improvement: implemented a cache for 3030+ RTK characters, which should improve response times (though in practice the main source of lag is server-client response, so it can vary a lot -- I typically see 600ms to 1sec from Belgium, the servers are in US)
• Increased the limit of results to 50 words (it was 30 before -- note the results are always sorted by priority so typically you'll find the word you're looking for)

What does "No common words" mean?

Koohii's dictionary focuses on the 16,000+ "priority" entries as defined by JMDICT (see Dictionary section of the documentation). This is the same source then eg. jisho.org. In fact 670+ kanji out of the 3039 kanji combined between Old & New RTK editions, do NOT have a "priority" entry. In this case the Dictionary says "There are no common words (...)". For example, if you lookup "prosperous" on jisho.org notice none of the words are tagged "common" or "jlpt". As you can see these characters are often used in unique place names. These charcters are of course important in RTK as "building blocks" for more complex characters.

Some statistics

Out of ~3030 RTK kanji (Volume 1 & 3):

• 479 with only 1 "common" word ("common" means a priority entry in JMDICT)
• 257 with 2 "common" words
• 193 with 3 "common" words
• 1870 with 1 to 5 "common" words
• 250 have more than 30 "common" words
• 120 have 50+ words (in which case the top 50 words by priority are shown)

Known limitations:

Dictionary entries for non-RTK kanji do not have the highlighted readings as they are not cached. This is a performance consideration. I could cache more data, but 99.99% of the time users will browse RTK kanji so it's not really worth the hassle and extra storage.

This update closes Github issue #122..

From what few responses I've got so far it seems you like the Cloze Delete formatting of the vocabulary attached to kanji cards.

I have known for a while now that some users customize the keywords in order to provide a similar functionality. Either to have a Japanese keyword, and/or to have a cloze delete prompt.

This update should definitely make such use of custom keywords obsolete. And of course it should be a lot quicker and easier now to add "cloze delete" prompts to your cards.

Currently I am looking into performance by pre-generating the Dictionary lookup results. It's really important to reduce the response times otherwise no matter how useful something is, if it's a chore to use then it's as good as "no use". Right now the response time is OK but the current implementation is still querying the database over multiple tables which is completely unnecessary! The dictionary is fairly static therefore we can just "pre render" that once in a while, and use our "pre rendered" results. At least we can do so for the 3030-ish RTK kanji.

I could still use some feedback and suggestions.

Today's update is an experiment. Let me know if you like it. Also forum thread.

Example words are now displayed on the front of the card using cloze test approach.

To select a word, open the dictionary with D on desktop or the "Dict" button at the top.

And if you want to focus on the kanji exclusively and do the readings later, you an simply ignore this.

Two fixes today:

• Kanji cards layout when no words are attached: for users who want to focus on kanji, the layout with space on the right side was distracting. Now kanji cards with no attached words use the "centered kanji" layout. That way, users who wish to focus exclusively on the kanji recall can do so.
  
  Note: if a word is present, you can just click / tap the word to pick another one. If no word is present then you have to click/tap the Dict button or use D shortcut (desktop) to open the Dictionary.

• Lack of an obvious "Close" button for the Dictionary dialog on smartphones (portrait view). Thanks to Nicolas for the report. Github issue #148

I'm a bit tired so I will post a more detailed breakdown of this update later, look for an update to this post.

You can now select an example word. The word shows on SRS and non-SRS reviews.

Your "vocab picks" (as I call them), are independent of kanji cards. Adding/removing cards to the SRS does not delete your vocab picks. If you add a card back and there was a vocab pick for it, then it will show again. There is currenty no way of "resetting / clearing" all vocab pick choices at once.

You can tap / click the word on the card to open the Dictionary.

Known limitations

• one word per card (for now)
• the highlighted reading for the kanji is not visible in Dictionary
• the highlighted reading for the kanji is not shown after selecting a word (it shows when the card shows up again in a later review)

I will improve performance of the Dictionary later, and should also add the highlighted reading everywhere.

Bugs & suggestions

Are welcome via the contact page, post in this forum thread and/or discuss in Github Issue #147.

The next update will bring a dead simple way of adding example words to the flashcards.

• Simply "star" a word in the Dictionary dialog, It is now linked to the flashcard
• To remove the word, "unstar" the same item
• Therefore, example words (demonstrating On / Kun readings) will no longer be selected at random. SRS cards will only display words that the user previously selected for that card

With this implementation it means a RTK learner can completely ignore example words. Once RTK is completed or at any point sooner, the user can start adding example words.

With this feature, we're allowing the user to select the words that make sense to them. For example you might pick something because it's in a textbook you use, or you learned it in class recently, or you saw it in a manga / movie, etc.

Coupled with the smart dictionary, it's easy to pick words that use kanji you have learned thus far, since they are highlighted and at the top of the Dictionary list.

For this first implementation I am using a "one word per card" limit. Over time as I have a better idea where to take this, along with your feedback, then maybe I'll enable 2 to 3 words per card.

It's important to keep in mind that we're not looking at a vocab SRS. We're looking at Kanji cards. The main function of the example words is to demonstrate existing readings for that character.