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Tuesday, February 17, 2009

One Hundred... and FOUR.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah!
We here at The Daily Yo-ji wanted to do something special to commemorate the posting of our 100th 四字熟語. But not only did we fail at "special," we failed at other, more important things, like noticing or counting...

So today we're celebrating our 104th 四字熟語! That's right. Of 197 posts on a website called "The Daily Yoji" which has been running for over a year, we've managed to pass on 104 4-character idiomatic expressions!

That's over 52% 四字-goodness.

That's over 416 kanji (though, with doubles and repeats, maybe closer to 375?)!

That's so many yo-ji that we don't remember many of them!

Woooooot!

That's why our 104th 四字 anniversary present to you is THIS.

Anki is the best free create-your-own Japanese flashchards program out there, and I'm assuming that many of you already use it. If you don't, now you have one more reason to start. Every 四字熟語 that has appeared on one of our posts, even if it didn't merit an entire post of it's own (I'm looking at you, 一生懸命), is collected and included in the first Daily Yoji Anki deck.

I've organized it so that it works for recognition only: you see the kanji and must recall the reading and meaning. If you're keen on remembering to write them all out yourself, once you download the file, you can reorganize it to include production as well.

In addition to the readings and meanings of each 四字熟語, you'll find occasional notes on usage, and labels that let you know how Common or Rare each yo-ji is, so you'll have a sense of how confident you can be if you want to use it. The labels range from "Extremely Common" to "Extremely Rare," and were determined through a complex process that took into account many factors:
  • Anecdotal evidence
  • Google searches
  • Native-speaker response in the comments sections
  • Number of times I've heard or seen them occur naturally
  • Reactions to my attempts at using them
  • Whether or not my girlfriend has ever heard of them
  • Whether or not Nirav posted them
... so there might be a margin of error.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy them, and I hope they help you retain some of what you've picked up here. If you find yourself interested in the meanings of the specific kanji, or suspect that a yo-ji might have an interesting origin, the search bar in the upper left corner of this page will help you out.

Thanks again for all your comments!

Jeff, Brett, and Niro

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's awesome :D
Even tough english is not my mother tongue, I've downloaded the deck and I'm already using it.

Anyway, congratulations. Keep it on ;D

Anonymous said...

Congratulations, DailyYoji Team!
Hope after this, we can reach new records and have more and more yojis :)

Claytonian said...

I would like to request an iKnow list too, but that would be a bit of grinding work to do. Anyways, I send my students links to things like anki and iknow, but they can't figure out how to even install anki; being octogenarians in a society that went the keitai route of tech.