Image-based Japanese Flashcards for your iPod

The JLPT is less than 40 days away now, are those of you who are planning to take it ready? If you need a bit more help cramming vocabulary and kanji, PlaySay might have a solution for you.

Image-Based Flashcard Examples for ANY JPEG capable device are now available. Here are the JLPT 1 images in action on my iPod Touch.

I set up a separate photo album for my JLPT Level 1 Japanese-English flashcards.

Few of the thousands of images that make up the set.

Clicking on some random place to start… we get 打撃！

Advance one image and you get the hiragana reading…

Advance again and you get the Kanji, the Hiragana, and the English meaning.

That’s it!*

*The PlaySay flashcards come with 3 folders of images giving you 3 ways to study. The images above show the Japanese-English way. It also comes with the reverse, an English-Japanese way. In addition, it comes with a “complete” set, in which there is only one card per vocabulary item, and they all look like the last image shown there, with the Kanji, Hiragana, and English all on one screen. More on that later.

The concept is incredibly simple. The vocabulary that you need to know (mostly kanji compounds) for the exam are in .jpg images with large font.

You get three folders full of images with your PlaySay Image-based Flashcards Purchase. Both the E-J and J-E folders include 3 images per vocabulary item (exceptions for katakana vocabulary). One image displays the kanji compound, one image displays the kanji and the reading, and another image displays the kanji, the reading, and the meaning in English all together on one image. The third folder contains the “complete” image set, in which a single image has the Kanji compound, the reading, and the English all together. The “complete” set allows you to study using one image per card. Again, when you purchase PlaySay for any JLPT level, you get all three of these folders, which allows you to study anyway you please.

This system is great. Perfect for a quick review anytime and anywhere. The only drawback is that since the images in the J-E and E-J folders are organized by filename, and since you need to have the 3 images (Kanji, Hiragana, Kanji+Hiragana+English) appear consecutively to be useful, there doesn’t seem to be a way to easily shuffle the cards and practice in a random order when using the E-J or J-E sets. However, you can shuffle the “complete” folder set as you like since there is only one image card per vocabulary item.

Having said that, in my experience the sheer volume of vocabulary has made simply beginning on some random card and then progressing through in order more than sufficient… There are just so many vocabulary cards that it feels random anyway. With JLPT1, we’re talking 2,957 individual vocabulary words here… 2,957! That’s a lot of vocab! I also wish the flashcards included example sentences, but hey, that’s what a dictionary is for I guess.

So, if you’ve got a pda-ish device that can display .jpg files, you might want to check these PlaySay Image-based Flashcards out. (They’re near the bottom of the page, after all of the PlaySay audio files, look for “Image-Based Flashcard Examples for ANY JPEG capable device”)

Happy studying!

- Harvey