Employment of 3D printing for enhanced kanji learning

Learning of kanji is a complex process that requires significant time and effort for understanding fundamentals of kanji construction, developing adequate writing skills, retention of proper meaning and language use, etc. Research presented in this work addresses earlier stages of kanji learning where basic understanding of kanji composition takes place and tangible associations are being established. Written kanji are essentially flat and thus resemble alphabet characters and numerals but in contrast to them many kanji and kanji components are derived from and thus directly associated with existing physical artifacts and notions. For novice kanji learners, however, it is usually very hard to analyze and map kanji and kanji components to existing artifacts. We attempt to facilitate this process by introducing various tangible kanji representations and bringing flat, written kanji back to the tangible 3D world where learners can get proper touch and feel of them. We report on the design and development of different spatial kanji models and construction sets for kanji learning experiments and research.