There are two examples of kana usage in Japan that demonstrate this; braille and morse code.

It can’t be claimed that blind people are unable to comprehend what they read in braille. It is the same Japanese. It is sound represented through kana encoded as braille.¹ Nor has this been lost on Japanese educators.

The blind man can be better educated than his more fortunate brethern who are endowed with good sight; for the former by acquiring the forty-seven letters of the I-ro-ha syllabary, through the Braille system, can read history, geography or anything written in that system; whereas he who has eyesight cannot read the daily paper unless he has mastered at least 2000 characters.

Nitobe Inazo, quoted in Ideogram J Marshall Unger. ²

Entire fleet movements and diplomatic negotiations were driven through kana, enciphered then encoded to a variation of the morse code, wabun code. Not only was this sufficient for the Japanese to understand but also for the British and Americans who had cracked their ciphers. (Although Toland seems to argue that the Americans’ poor translations hindered the negotiations to avoid war. p180 Rising Sun)

Another example, this time of romaji use, is in multipart carbonless forms on postal deliveries. These have to be made with a typewriter and romaji is the most efficient way to do this. And yet no-one would suggest that the Japanese post office can’t read these addresses and deliver them, extremely quickly.

The Myth that bloggers are perpetuating is number five on DeFrancis’ list of six myths about Chinese characters. The Indispensability Myth. More than anything else, the continued use of kanji in Japan is cultural rather than pragmatic. Perhaps bloggers want to have extra reasons to spend a large amount of time on learning kanji. Kanji are indispensable to being literate in Japanese, given that that is what is used in Japan, but you cannot rightly claim that kanji are the only way to properly represent spoken Japanese (nor the most functional).

Unfortunately we have to deal with what is. While it would be pragmatic to use kana or romaji alone, “real” Japanese is written using kanji. Japanese would find kana alone easier in the long run as they have complete command of their spoken language, but for JSL learners oddly kanji when augmented with a computer can make things easier. It is easier to do a dictionary search. It is also possible to extract some meaning without fully understanding the kanji or the word. ³

I doubt very much there will be any language reform to eliminate kanji. They are too much a part of the culture at this point. Language reform would need a revolution to carry it, such as when kanzi were simplified under the communists in China, or abandoned in favour of a roman alphabet in Vietnam. Or be imposed by a totalitarian regime such as happened with hangul. At any rate, reform if it comes will come from the Japanese themselves rather than from any outside forces. Japan’s last opportunity was immediately after World War II, while they did simplify some things they didn’t bite the bullet and introduce more far reaching script reforms.

For JSL learners, the trend now seems to be hiragana, then a limited amount of kanji in Adult education at least where once whole courses would only use romaji. The emphasis is on spoken Japanese and communication. ⁴ Romaji is often used in the earlier stages. I suspect university degree courses have a greater emphasis on written Japanese and kanji (but have yet to satisfactorily address how to teach these). For self-taught, well it’s up to the individual. But I’m sad to see an emerging elitism around the use of kana and kanji (and specific methods) rather than an excitement in exploring Japanese to whatever level is desired.

Further reading.
J Marshall Unger is very interesting on the area of script reform, romaji and literacy. While I’m sure many would dispute with him, his credentials as a researcher and scholar of Japanese are impeccable. Unlike me, say, he’s not just a random blogger.

Here are excerpts from
The Fifth Generation Fallacy
This is an interesting book. The computing aspects are completely outdated now, but they do give an insight into problems that have only relatively recently been overcome. I’d like to see an essay from Ungar on what he thinks of the current situation in computing in regards to the Japanese language now. Whereas in 1987 he was writing about the complexity and cost of pen input and OCR, yet I now have good pen input on a Nintendo DS and OCR that costs under $200 (compared to $50,000 plus for roman only when he was writing). However what he has to say about Japanese literacy and the efficiency of roman touch-typed input compared to any other method still remains true today.

Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan
Research from the late 1940′s suggest that romaji is a much better way for Japanese children to learn. Research also suggests that Japan might not have been as literate a society as was imagined. Kanji were for the elite, who had the time to master them.

Ideogram

Notes

1. There are systems for representing kanji in braille but understandably they don’t seem to have much traction. Ungar points out in Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan that it was developed for social reasons as the blind were discriminated against for their inability to talk about and deal with kanji (p26, p126).

2. Nitobe probably wrote this in English, rather than this being a translation. However I can’t access the original source.

3.

Many non-Japanese believe that because they can guess the meaning of a word like uwayaku if they know the meanings of other words written with the same kanji, “knowing a kanji” in this ad hoc sense is sufficient for written communication. For them, the correct reading is a mere detail of little consequence. While it is easy to see why they should think this way, they are mistaken—as are Chinese college students who think they can coast through Japanese texts by looking only at the kanji.

J Marshall Unger Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan p20

4. It’s hard to find studies about teaching Japanese or literacy in JSL learners. Maybe this discourse only happens in Japanese, maybe it just doesn’t happen. My only resource is the Internet really, where sometimes I find tantalising references or abstracts but without access to a university library or login (and 4 years of not getting paid and circa £70k to spare to pursue a language degree) my amateur (dilettantish) efforts are stymied. I wish bloggers would either keep to opinion (“this is how it works for me”) rather than absolute statements not backed up by citations or research (“romaji is bad”) or even just stop making stuff up.

Related posts:

1. Easy Japanese Crosswords Puzzles: Using Kana
2. Is Romaji a bad idea?
3. Self Study Kana Workbook

Related posts:

1. Basic Japanese Through Comics (parts 1 and 2)
2. Kanji Sieve – Analysing Kanji Usage
3. Sudoku using Kanji

Another month another set of improvements to Kanji Sieve.
In this release I concentrated on getting data in and out of the program.

• It is possible to import records from a previous version.
• As I strongly believe that the data belongs to the user it can all be exported in a variety of formats to be used elsewhere.
• You can use a built-in mini browser to search for texts at your favourite sites.
• Plain text and audio can be imported.
• Chuta can now be viewed online on PCs and Macs
• There is a choice of 7 online dictionaries to search for word meanings
• Individual dictionary lookups are automated
• The layout is now more flexible
• There is a full screen mode for reading
• There is an online help system (in progress)
• The interface colour has been toned down
• Interface and navigation improvements

I was hesitant about using Chuta online display. It was the only way at the moment to implement it for the PC. Chuta only stores a search for a limited time and while chuta is fast it does take a while to compile the custom page. I would prefer to work with cached data. What I do in the online display is check to see if the remote cache has expired and if it has fetch it again. It’s not ideal when loading the Chuta pane in the program but it is the best for now. I also had to sacrifice some screen real estate to get feedback that the program hadn’t frozen. After the first time your own cache should speed loading. Mac users can still work with the cached data by setting a preference.

There are now several dictionary urls to chose from. I think jisho.org (denshi jisho) in a mobile phone version or risukun are the fastest and cleanest. Jim Breen’s wwwjdic is comprehensive but you need to pare down the interface via the preferences to avoid information overload and clutter. The Japanese dictionaries from Wordbank, Yahoo, Goo and ALC all have ads to a varying degree. ALC is the worst, which makes for a very cluttered window without expanding it.
As I like to automate where I can you can submit a search just by clicking a button in the wordlist. You don’t have to type or copy and paste if you don’t want to. Owing to the imprecision of looking up words automatically you have to chose the correct version from the results and paste that into your wordlist yourself.

There is a mini-browser to help with getting text into the program. I dislike jumping from program to program so I wanted something “right there”. However it’s not as capable as a proper browser like Safari or Firefox (and on the PC you’re stuck with the dreadful Internet Explorer engine). And there is no ad filtering. One way around this is to use Evernote and your usual browser to collect interesting text then access your Evernote account from with Kanji Sieve. ( note: Kanji Sieve does not store or access any passwords, history etc. This is all handled by your computers browser software and stored elsewhere on your system. (Safari on the Mac, IE on Windows) Apart from accessing the help files through a browser, the software does not in any way call home. The only data going out are submissions to chuta.jp and dictionary sites for word lookups.)

I am happier with the PC version this time around. Overall I really think this is becoming a usable and useful tool.

The online help is a work in progress. I will be writing it over the next month or so. After that it will be on to version 0.5 to release sometime in November.

The downloads are here.

––update 04Oct10––
bug release v0.4.1 released 3 Oct

Related posts:

1. Kanji Sieve 0.5 released
2. Kanji Sieve for Windows
3. Kanji Sieve 0.3 Mac

This year’s kanjikentei 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. July JLPT in London

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 v0.4 released

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 v0.4 released
3. Kanji Sieve 0.4 progress

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 v0.4 released
3. Kanji Sieve 0.4 progress

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

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