This year’s kanjikeiten will be held on Sunday 31st of October at SOAS UCL London.
They have a Google webform this year for candidates to request application forms. The deadline is the 28th September. You can sit more than one level if you want but this year I’ll only be attempting 8 kyu. It may take me a few years to reach my 5 kyu goal of the 1006 primary school kanji. It’s not the kanji so much as the vocabulary and usage.

Be aware that British Summer Time ends on the 31st, so make sure you turn up on time for the test!

(I had a rather interesting search term in my blog stats today. “Heisig classes in Tokyo” Good Luck with that, Heisig seemed very anti-teacher and only an individual could manage his method. And only the Internet has kept his book in print… )

Also open for applications is the 2010 JLPT held at SOAS. This year they have online application and are again limiting candidates to 1000 across all levels. I must get back on track with JLPT. The leap to 2 was too daunting, but now there is the intermediate N3 I should give it a go. Just not this year!

Related posts:

1. Kanken Kanji Aptitude Test London 2009
2. After Kanken 2009
3. London JLPT closing date

おはよう
This is a one minute short part of the Ani*Kuri15 project for NHK.
It’s a good example of his style.

Related posts:

1. JLPT Changes from 2010
2. MVM

The downloads are here and I have a movie demonstrating Kanji Sieve instead of help files.

––update 01Aug10––
And already I have an update. When I was setting conditional formatting for Windows I inadvertently removed the record highlighting from the list view. Version 0.3.2 adds this back. I haven’t uploaded full packages for this just the Kanji Sieve Data.usr file. Replace the .usr file in v0.3.1 with this file. Unfortunately I haven’t implemented import of records yet, so any records you have will have to be re-entered.

Related posts:

1. Kanji Sieve Windows coming soon
2. Kanji Sieve 0.3 Mac
3. Kanji Sieve v0.2

I may have more time again to develop my little application Kanji Sieve.
While I still can’t solve my display problem on the PC to allow use of the Chuta dictionary, I can parse returns from Chuta so text can be broken down into words. Therefore for the time being (maybe longer. sorry) I’ve bypassed this feature and PC Users will have to use another dictionary and do searches manually. Once I’ve gotten the cleanup done for PC (and maybe toned down the colour for perhaps my only user!) I’ll post Kanji Sieve 0.3 for Windows within the next week or two.

In related news, FileMaker have released Filemaker Go. This is an app for iOS4 to allow you to run FileMaker databases on iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads. I think this is potentially exciting. It’s at the more expensive end of the app price scale (£13, $20) but it looks fantastic and can open runtime solutions. It certainly had none of the issues I had going from Mac to PC. I tried Kanji Notebook on it and was surprised at how it looked and behaved. Mostly it behaves and looks exactly as it does on my MacBook, although because of the screen size you need to zoom around like in the iPhone version of Safari. The transfer was quick and easy, and according to the manuals the unsupported features are quite few. Lack of support for plugins though means that Kanji Sieve wouldn’t work as I really on external grep functions and Internet routines. On a more standard solution initially the bigger drawbacks are the lack of support for top to bottom Japanese text and a speed issue in running some scripts. But with a bit of thought and design specifically for an iPhone I might be able to make some useful and portable applications.

Related posts:

1. Kanji Sieve for Windows
2. Kanji Sieve 0.3 Mac
3. FileMaker Kanji Project – progress 2

––update 01Sep10––
They won!
Yay for the skewed results of Internet voting!
I could hear the clenching of teeth in the Foster’s PR’s statements about the win.

Related posts:

1. Frank Chickens at the Komedia Brighton
2. Frank Chickens Rides Again!
3. Chickens at Shunt

Kanji Sieve for Mac v0.3 is ready. Unfortunately due to pressing matters elsewhere this is about as far as I can go for now.
Unavoidably that means it could be a few months before a Windows version appears.
Rather than sit on the Mac version which is functional, now that I have permissions for the Chuta dictionary and Flashcard Deluxe features I decided to upload it.

The windows version has a huge problem at the moment. A core screen is just not rendering properly no matter what I try. Ugly I could live with but this is completely unfunctional, the css doesn’t render properly and the Japanese becomes mojibake. I *think* it is due to the Internet Explorer version I am using under XP, but until I can explore this under Vista or Windows 7 I’m at a complete loss. If I can find the time I’ll do my best to get a Windows version working. Although I’m now leaning towards just cutting this function from the windows version rather than chase after workarounds in Internet Explorer.

So here we are at version 0.3

What does Kanji Sieve do?
It takes a piece of text entered by the user and first it breaks down the kanji usage to show you which kanji are used by grade and how often they are used in the text. Then it submits the text to chuta.jp. Primarily this is so the text can be parsed to allow individual words to be extracted into a list. Using online dictionaries the user can then put meaningful definitions to the entries in a wordlist. Finally a tab-delimited flashcard deck is generated that can be used with the iOS app Flashcards Deluxe. If multiple pieces of text are entered a listing of the 20 most frequent unknown kanji can be generated, unique to the user and the pieces of text they find interesting.

My thesis is that the 1006 kyouiku kanji are the best target for Intermediate JSL students. The grade school groupings break these down into manageable chunks. If you follow the grade school groupings there is also a wealth of Japanese learning material available. Keywords are only a tiny part of learning a kanji. Indeed thinking about it as learning to read and write, rather than learning kanji would be much more useful. That said you need to learn by reading and using Japanese. Reading targeted at your interests, providing you with a vocabulary you might actually use. SRS systems can help but words and characters need context and to be meaningful in order to be remembered and used properly.
Kanji Sieve may help with this part of the process.

I have ideas about the process of learning individual kanji, which I hope to cover in a post some day.
I feel it needs several elements.

• You need to find meaning in the characters – by breaking them down and understanding their structures.
• You need to break the task down into manageable chunks. – 2000 kanji isn’t a manageable chunk.
• You need a variety of methods and tasks – to stop you getting bored or only being able to function in one method.
• You need to find it immediately useful – to be able to use words in real life situations.

I am very grateful to Professor Nakamura for giving me permission to use the Chuta web dictionary in this solution. For the full Chuta experience go to チュウ太のweb辞書, where you will find many more language options than are available in Kanji Sieve and I also recommend the Reading Tutor site
Also thanks to Ernie the maker of Flashcard Deluxe for permission to incorporate a link to his app.

Kanji Sieve Mac 0.3 runtime download page
You will also find a movie demonstrating the solution on this page.

Related posts:

1. Kanji Sieve for Windows
2. FileMaker Kanji Project – progress 2
3. Kanji Sieve v0.2

Coming soon. I had hoped to release v0.3 of Kanji Sieve in May, but it will now be mid-June. It required a lot of work. I’ve been cleaning up the behind the scenes scripting etc. and learning a lot as I go along. All the features I want for v0.3 are in place and working (hopefully without any bugs). What I am now mostly doing is sorting out the fonts on Windows. I also have to make some decisions about Kanji Notebook. I am using some data from it but there’s at least a month’s worth of work before the file is usable as a notebook. It possibly needs to be truncated and definitely needs to be locked away from the user in this release.

Some screen shots after the jump.

Main view.
Here is where you can see the statistics for a document and make your wordlists.
I’m pleased that I can get the kanji to highlight depending on the tab being viewed.
I’ve based it around a netbook’s resolution of 800 by 600. I found it didn’t use extra horizontal resolution and I could make the layout expand vertically if there was a larger screen.
I’m fairly happy with the interface, I don’t think it will change radically from now on. I may try to iconise it a bit more, maybe use more Japanese as the default language. I’m not sure I have the energy to make it capable of being localised without starting from scratch. My development strategy has been too haphazard really. I want to put my energies into features I want to use first and foremost.

List view.
In this version, you will be able to keep track of multiple files. Here the user will be able to sort and select documents, and perform certain tasks like editing and deleting.

Flashcards
My iPod Touch flashcard program of choice is Flashcards Deluxe. Using FileMaker’s webviewer I’ve made it easier for me to upload decks. There is also automatic generation of a list based around the most frequent unknown 20 kanji from your documents. I’d like to expand the management of wordlists in the next iteration of KanjiSieve.
This is one of a few features I feel I have to get clearance for before I upload Kanji Sieve v0.3 for public consumption.
The web is a rich source of data. It’s fine for me to mash it up for myself but to wrap my own app around a webviewer is a different matter. I’m only really automating some of what could be done with a normal browser and concentrating it for ease of use but … it’s best to get agreement.

I already have a list of to-do’s for v0.4 but for now, back to the home straight on v0.3.

––update 01Jun10––
Aaaaaaargh!
Windows cleanup is not going well. Many things are ok-ish. But the webviewers are sometimes spectacularly messed up to the point of mojibake. One so badly I’m not sure where to start. I had hoped css would take care of webviewers and conditional formatting would take care of FileMaker native text, but no, I have a lot more work than I thought to Window-ise what I’ve done. If you want it to look good FileMaker’s not as cross-platform as you might hope. If I can’t solve these problems I might end up with a Mac only solution.
orz

Related posts:

1. FileMaker Kanji Project – progress 2
2. FileMaker Kanji Project – progress 1
3. Kanji Sieve for Windows

Related posts:

1. Irish Leaving Cert Japanese — Nihongo Kantan
2. EnglishPod101
3. にほんごをまなぼう　Lets Study Japanese

Related posts:

1. Japanese Blog in German
2. Sudoku using Kanji

Now with added Kanji Sieve. Or rather the way Kanji Sieve has evolved means I’ll be incorporating my Kanji NoteBook project with it.
Unfortunately I think the direction I’m heading in means an awful lot of work on the interface. And a lot of time I don’t have to spare at the moment, but I am working on it and am excited about the way it’s progressing.
The next Kanji Sieve will have multiple records, so you will save you pieces of text for future use. I’m dropping the keywords as completely futile for reading or understanding a text (although useful when first learning a kanji. I have a blog post in progress about this). I’m fairly confident of parsing text automatically to build word lists. This is why I’ve decided it makes sense to incorporate Kanji Notebook with it, if not in v0.3 at least by v0.4.

I will also automatically generate and manage lists for a flashcard system. Primarily as a tab separated text file so you can import to the tool of your choice rather than my trying to re-invent something that others are doing quite well. I have a basic flash card solution but as I have other tools that work better for my purposes I won’t be pursuing it.
I’m thinking about how to aggregate statistics across the database. I would like to rank unknown kanji and words by how frequent they are overall in the pieces of text you store in Kanji Sieve. This would mean needing a listing of known kanji and vocabulary that can be filtered. That might then give an indication of what words are personally more important to learn. Again maybe one for v0.4 when Kanji Notebook is incorporated.

Most of the functions I want are in place. I can make it work for my own needs but I need to make it work for other people before I release it. I also have to think now about how data will transfer across successive future builds.
In the meantime here’s a pic of the NoteBook.

Related posts:

1. FileMaker Kanji Project – Progress 3
2. FileMaker Kanji Project – progress 1
3. Kanji Sieve 0.3 Mac