I’ve been working away at Kanji Sieve whenever I get the opportunity.
Printing has now been added. It will now print the text, stats and vocab for a record properly.
As I don’t like jumping from application to application I’ve added the capability to browse your favourite sites within Kanji Sieve to find new texts.
Although the base layout is designed for small screens I’ve made the screens more flexible for larger screen sizes.
When making new records you can now import a text file. I’ve also added search and replace including regular expression abilities in New Record and Edit Record to clean up texts, removing furigana in brackets for instance. (I may look into the optional display of furigana at a later date.)
I’ve cleared up a couple of bugs. I’ve made popup windows modal to stop users going astray by accident.
I’ve updated the version of 360 Works Scriptmaster bundled in the runtime.

Windows still has me stumped to an extent. As this is a hobby project not a commercial one, and to be honest not many people seem to be downloading Kanji Sieve, I can’t justify the cost of setting up a Windows system just to chase down the glitches. (I looked at cheap netbooks but it doesn’t help that Windows 7 has a confusing array of flavours and I’m not sure at which point you get Japanese support. I prefer Mac’s system of buy once get everything.) So while I realise a lot of people are on Windows, I’m doing this firstly for myself and I use a Mac.

I should have something by the end of this month. As soon as I sort out data transfer from version to version I’ll post the update. I might need to consider a data separation model where the user data is kept in a separate file but this may have to wait until I stop adding to the solution.

Related posts:

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

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 0.4 progress
2. Kanji Sieve Windows coming soon
3. Kanji Sieve 0.3 Mac

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. Kanji Sieve 0.4 progress
3. FileMaker Kanji Project – progress 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 0.4 progress

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

As can be seen from the above certificate I passed 9th grade in the Kanken test. やった！
I was reasonably confident however. Although I can be a little proud of my achievement it only puts me on a par with a below average seven year old, with knowledge of 240 common kanji. However I can say that the knowledge is native level. I can read the onyomi, kunyomi and tokubetsu readings and write them by hand, not just put an English keyword to them.

You get a lot for the £23 exam fee. There was the test itself that had to be hand marked and this morning I got a packet with

• my certificate to go on the wall
• two certificates that I think are for a school or work file
• an answer sheet for the test I took
• a marking sheet showing the answers I got correct and incorrect
• my ranking relative to the average score on a spider diagram
• an serial number and password (also in 3D barcode for a phone) to log in to the kanken site
• comments and advice

And the time frame for the result is pretty good after all. I took it on the fifth of November, it was awarded on the 24th, presumably then sent from Japan and posted onward from London yesterday.

So in the end I got 136points out of 150. 120 was the pass mark. My reading was a bit below the average though. Mind you the average was between 95 and 100 percent in all the areas.
So onwards and upwards towards level 8 (440 characters) next year, hopefully in the summer rather than to have to wait a whole year. My medium term goal are the 1006 grade school kanji at level 5. Maybe above level 2 would be a lifetime goal difficult even for Japanese. The ultimate level, level one, for instance tests 6000 characters. I doubt I shall ever see such giddy heights.

I think this test is a good adjunct to JLPT. Although primarily about kanji, as it is aimed at native speakers and is all in Japanese it will test your reading and writing abilities to their limit and you can be sure they are on a par with Japanese students at the same level.

I heartily recommend this test to anyone who can find an exam centre. Unfortunately that usually means Japan. But if you cannot find one maybe you could see if your school or college would offer it, I don’t think it would be that difficult for them to apply to to it. It might also be possible for them to get assistance from the Japanese embassy’s cultural attaché.

Related posts:

1. Kanken Kanji Aptitude Test London 2009
2. After Kanken 2009
3. Kanken London 2010

漢字学習ステップ８級 published by: 日本漢宇能力検定協会

Another book to prepare for the kanken test. This time it is an official book published by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation. It is a textbook for Japanese people, completely in Japanese and requiring a vocabulary beyond that which the kanji might suggest. Maybe it’s for grade school children but I’m certain parts of it are intended for their parents.

It follows the familiar formula of presenting the kanji with a stroke count, radical, onyomi and kunyomi. The readings that are learnt at middle school are marked. There are comprehensive guides to writing the kanji properly. Much more so than would be usual with texts for non-Japanese I think. It’s important to get good habits early on and develop well balanced well written kanji.
There aren’t example sentences but compounds are given for each kanji. I presume these would be the words that would appear on the Kanken test.

The main attractions of the book are the Kanken style tests that are included. In these you give fill in blanks by writing the kanji or it’s reading in short sentences. There are also exercises were you count strokes, or make a kanji from given components. There are also some interesting game like tests that I wouldn’t think would appear on the test. Looking at the pictures accompanying the test scores only a perfect 100 seems acceptable, the rabbit next to the acceptable 80 looks really annoyed and next to 50 positively upset.

Finally you can chart your progress by filling in the date you complete sections and should you feel the need colouring in the wall chart that comes with the book. My schooldays were never like this.

Related posts:

1. 漢字練習ノート・小学２年生 • Kanji Practice Notebook Grade 2
2. Kanji Aptitude Test
3. JLPT Mock Test Level 3

Adanami Shobo Brewer Street

There’s no signage, in fact it still has the signs from the dry cleaners who once owned the shop. And it’s not a temporary thing as they’ve been there well over 2 years now. This small shop is crammed with Japanese books and manga.

It reminds me of a tiny Book Off, except the manga are shrinkwrapped. Compared to other places you can get Japanese books in London their prices are very reasonable. If you can actually read Japanese this is the place to head.

The manga are a little old perhaps and you probably won’t find any current titles. But there’s One Piece, Hana Yori Dango, Dragonball, and Doreamon, to name a few. There are also some children’s books, which can be a good place to start reading Japanese as well.

Perhaps the biggest secret might be the karaoke rooms in the back. If they’re signposted it’s in Japanese and I ignored it in the general language overload. It was pointed out to me by a Japanese lady who saw the copy of ジャリン子チエ I had just bought on the table beside me in a café. And today again (inspiring this post) by Travis who has a blog on Japanese Art you also might like to check out.

There is also a branch in North London.
387 Edgeware Road, Colindale, London NW9
Also a second hand bookshop crammed floor to ceiling with books and magazines. Apparently it is only open at the weekend. I haven’t been there in about 3 years so it may no longer be there…

Related posts:

1. JP Books of Piccadilly
2. Yotsuba＆! • よつばと！

漢字練習ノート・小学２年生　author: 下村昇 published by: 偕成社

Inspired by the upcoming Kanken test in June I went looking for some Kanji texts in JP Books yesterday. This workbook is one of the two books I bought. It is a companion volume to a more comprehensive yet small book 漢字の本2年生

As I wanted to use it more for revision I decided to skip the main book and just use the workbook. Also the main text being entirely in Japanese (as is the workbook by the way) needed more concentration than I really wanted to give to it. However I think once you reach a certain level it’s very useful and satisfying to work in an all Japanese environment.

This book is one of a series of six aimed at Japanese primary school students; one for each grade. there is a slight overlap with JLPT kanji. Grade 1 covers a lot of the JLPT4 kanji, with Grade 2 you’ll cover most of the JLPT3 kanji, and Grade 3 goes beyond JLPT3.
This book covers the 160 Grade 2 kanji. Each kanji takes a quarter of a two page spread. Each entry has four sections.

• A breakdown of the kanji. onyomi, kunyomi, stoke count, radical, category.
• How to write the kanji. Stroke order, notes on the type of strokes, kanji broken down into components.
• Kanji Etymology. Diagrams showing how the kanji evolved. The pictorial meaning.
• Fill in the blanks. Practice using the kanji in sentences.

The kanji are presented in order of categories, people, animals, plants, house etc. These are very useful at this stage but as the ideas get more abstract at higher grades I suspect many will fall into the その他　everything else category. Stroke count and radical are needed to use dictionaries properly. They are tested in the Kanken test.

The way the kanji are broken down is quite interesting. You could use the instructions to verbally describe to a Japanese person how to write it, in much the same way as in English you’d tell someone how to spell a word.

The etymology helps you understand the kanji. If you can understand it you are more likely to remember it and recognise components in more complex kanji.

Fill in the blanks is useful in giving you example sentences but you don’t even have to guess what you have to write. A longer test page would be more useful.

I think this is a good little book. It only costs 500 yen. I think you could use it as a starting point in learning kanji, before using more comprehensive books aimed at adult second language learners such as JLPT3 Kanji by Examples or Basic Kanji Book vol 1 and 2.

Related posts:

1. 漢字学習ステップ８級 • Kanji Study Step Level 8
2. JLPT 3 Grammar Exercises
3. Japanese Childrens Kanji Book

English words made only from twenty-six characters? Are English a bit lazy or what? We have fifty thousand characters in Chinese

— A Concise Chinese – English Dictionary for Lovers — Xiaolu Guo

On Sunday 22 June at SOAS in London the 11th Kanji Aptitude Test in the UK will take place.

There are 12 levels ranging from level 1 with 6000 kanji, Genius level! to Level 10 with 80 kanji, primary school level. Each test takes 1 hour. The pass mark is a relatively high 70% or 80%.
Pretty much the real deal.
You can find details of the levels here.

The test fee is from £23 to £50 depending on level, but averaging about £25. Unlike the JLPT you are able to sit different levels on the same day.
This way you can either collect the full set of certificates, over time, or you can fall back on an easier level or stretch yourself by trying a higher level without having to wait a year to resit because you chose the wrong level. The only limitation seems to be the willingness to pay the fee for each level.

The tests are more traditional than JLPT; no multichoice here. You have to write your answers; both reading, where you write the hiragana for a kanji, and writing where you write the kanji are tested.
Stroke order and counting are also tested. So are the correct way of writing strokes and radicals.
Reading through sample pages, I think it also helps to have a good vocabulary and ability to speak Japanese. Context will help you a lot. Remember that these tests are actually for Japanese people rather than second language learners.
You can find sample tests on the Kanken site. The site is in Japanese however. The buttons to various levels are in the middle of the page. There are grade school tests available on this site which would be useful to practice with.

Application forms can be requested from SOAS, details are on their website. The deadline for applications is May 22. SOAS also say they can send you sample tests but somehow I didn’t get any with my application form.

I think I’m going to give level 8 (440 kanji) a go. (Maybe 9 to be safe! after all I have to write them as well.) For future years I’ll work towards level 5 which should overlap quite a bit with JLPT 2.

It’s probably a bit late for this year but there are Kanken games available for the Nintendo DS and there are also books available from Amazon.jp

Related posts:

1. Kanken Kanji Aptitude Test London 2009
2. Kanken Result 2009
3. Kanken London 2010