Kanji Scripts

One way I get sentences for my flash card decks is using kanjiscripts, a collection of ruby scripts that play with data from Tatoeba. Check out this search engine for Japanese-English sentence pairs. You search by Japanese character strings. The output is a text file where each line has a sentence in Japanese (kanji), Japanese (kana), and English. You can easily import this data into Anki.

If you're studying a list of single character kanji, you probably want to learn some words that contain those kanji. Feed your kanji list to kanjiscripts and the output will be a list of sentence pairs oriented around those characters. Import this sentence list into Anki and have fun studying!

Most commonly-used kanji are in many sentences, although some obscure kanji are not. All of the elementary school kanji are used in example sentences with English pairs in the corpus.

The source code for kanjiscripts is on github, or you can download the current release.