KanjiFocus

An abandoned prototype of a browser extension that fetches kanji familiar to the user from Anki and highlights those kanji on websites.

The hypothesized benefits of the highlighting for beginner Japanese learners:

• Helps one orient oneself in a relatively difficult text and find entry points from which to begin digesting each sentence—promotes early immersion and makes the challenging texts slightly more comprehensible.

• Encourages putting effort into recalling possibly familiar words over skipping straight to a dictionary lookup or wasting too much effort on failed recall attempts—promotes economical vocabulary acquisition.

Notes

• Provided as is: the addon is not available in a user-friendly form, because it never reached that development stage.

• Works properly only in Firefox.

• No configuration interface: Anki deck name, word field name, kanji highlight styling are all hardcoded in src/entries/background/main.ts.

Running

Setup & build

cd KanjiFocus
pnpm install
pnpm build

Option 1: Run with hot-reload through web-ext

pnpm serve:firefox

Option 2: Load manually

1. In Firefox, navigate to about:debugging.

2. Click This Firefox.

3. Click Load Temporary Add-on.

4. Select KanjiFocus/dist/manifest.json.

Usage

1. Navigate to a website with Japanese text.

2. Open the addon from the Extensions menu.

3. Click Fetch familiar kanji….

   Note that for this to work, Anki must be running along with the AnkiConnect addon and the variables DECK_NAME and FIELD_NAME in src/entries/background/main.ts must be set according to the name of your Japanese vocabulary deck and the name of the note field containing the Japanese word.

4. Click Higlight familiar kanji….

License

KanjiFocus
Copyright (C) 2022–2023 Piotr Grabowski

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.