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

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

I was a little underwhelmed by Apple’s two recent offerings. The Touch didn’t get a camera and the price drop has yet to convince me to buy one. Maybe in the New Year.

Then there was Snow Leopard. Anything new and exciting here? Anything new for Japanese learners?

Not really. There’s a few new fonts (nothing too exciting) and there’s a port of the input method for Chinese from the Touch. That was enough to get me to buy a copy. It was cheap at any rate.

But like quite a number of people our MacBooks aren’t current enough to use this input. It’s only enabled if you have a multi-touch trackpad.

Even then it’s Chinese. No kana recognition so if you want to write a sentence you’ll be switching in and out of it. There’s also the possibility that a few native Japanese kanji won’t be recognised, although I’ve yet to test this on my visits to the Apple Store.
It is an improvement over the Touch version. The input area is bigger and your finger doesn’t obscure what you are writing. But I still had problems once the stroke number got high.

I understand why Apple didn’t want a stylus on the iPhone but the party line of fingers are better for everything is bull. good for pointing and clicking and manipulating maybe but not for writing. Pens give more fine control. There’s a reason we don’t fingerpaint letters or use crayons. We like to have characters under 10mm square rather than the 40 or 50 mm needed with my fingers; or over 100 mm with complex characters.

So the Chinese input is a bit disappointing. I haven’t tried a tablet yet but I don’t really expect it to work. there’s no good reason why a tablet or a normal trackpad shouldn’t work, except Apple doesn’t want it to. (although mice and trackpads don’t have absolute co-ordinates it’s a bit hard to write with them) Maybe someone will hack it or come up with an application that can make use of the data to expand the available methods of input.

I would have preferred Decuma or its successor. Maybe the tablet if it exists will be a better experience. Maybe typing is quicker and more accurate.

I’m sticking to DS for learning to write kanji on the move.

––attribution––
The image used on this post is adapted from an image on Flickr
Thanks to Nancy on Flickr for allowing her images to be used and adapted.
The orginal image.
License information
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Related posts:

1. Kanji Aptitude Test
2. MacOS X 10.5 Leopard すごい！
3. Mac OSX

Since MacOS X was first released the built-in support for Japanese has been excellent. Everything you need for Japanese is in the standard installation. It’s there when you want it. It just works; no searching around for install disks. I recently installed Windows XP using Parallels on my Mac. Boy it’s clunky. Mac is the way to go for Japanese. Doubly so because, if you want, with an Intel Mac you can get Windows too.

Japanese support was a big reason for me to go OS X several years ago. It was a deciding factor on Leopard as well.

I’m a bit wary of upgrading my system when everything is working because invariably something I like stops working and all the furniture is moved yet again. So while I have had Leopard since it was released I have only recently installed it, the new Japanese features were part of the decision.

First and foremost for Japanese support is the Kotoeri input system (known on other systems as the IME). On the Mac this is activated in the International System Preference. I choose romaji, hiragana and katakana; and I turn off the national keyboard to tidy up the input menu. I don’t like those flags really.

By choosing hiragana input when you type in Latin characters hiragana will appear. ha, hi, fu, he, ho becomes は、ひ、ふ、へ、ほ. nihonngo becomes にほんご, and when you press the space bar this converts to kanji, 日本語. Simple. Just be careful the kanji you choose are the right ones. You may also be presented with a choice by the system in the form of a pop-up menu.

This is all as before. The huge, fantastic, change is that now Kotoeri is in English! Both the help files and the preferences. You are no longer guessing or laboriously translating in order to get the best from the input system. Finally I can understand how to add custom readings of words I use a lot like friends names so the system doesn’t mangle them.

Another way to input kanji is by using the character palette. This is organised like a traditional dictionary. If you don’t know a character’s reading and you can recognise its radical you can look it up by radical and stroke count using the character palette. It’s a bit laborious but might be useful if you need to look up a printed kanji. Once it’s a digital character it is then easy to do a dictionary search or reverse convert it to hiragana.

Lastly you could use a Japanese keyboard. Although it may be difficult to source one outside Japan. I bought a nice little Apple wireless keyboard the last time I was in Japan. However it’s not as easy as I thought. It’s very slow to relearn a keyboard layout, even when I just do two finger hunt and peck typing. The pluses are having hard wired keys to jump between romaji and kana input. I’ve also found it useful when using Maniackers kana fonts.

The next big item in Leopard is the inclusion of Japanese dictionaries. This is big. As far as I am aware there are no other foreign dictionaries included with OS X. Although “translate” is a very misleading term for Apple to use in relation to using a dictionary.

There are 3 dictionaries from Shogakukan. A Japanese dictionary, a Japanese to English dictionary and a Japanese synonyms dictionary. These are primarily for Japanese speakers but they are very useful for learners as well.
Once you are at the Intermediate stage it is a good idea to try to use an all Japanese dictionary if you can. It is better to understand a word in reference to its own language rather than to rely on English headwords.
However a word will be searched across all the dictionaries so you can quickly jump over to the Japanese – English dictionary to get an English meaning. To go from English to Japanese is a little harder. You can search an English word in this dictionary but the results will be all kanji. To get a reading you may need to click on a kanji word which will give you a reading for it in its own separate entry. The synonym dictionary has a similar function to a thesaurus.

Indexing means lookups are superfast. All dictionaries can be searched at once and everything is cross linked so it’s also fast to browse topics in the dictionaries.
I still need JEDict. JEDict’s searches are slow by comparison but the dictionary files in JEDict are much simpler. Maybe someday someone will compile Edict and the ALC dictionaries for Mac’s dictionaries. Even enabling Dictionary to send a search to Denshi Jisho and ALC‘s websites in the same way wikipedia can be searched from the Dictionary would be very useful. (as yet I can’t find a way to implement this functionality)

Lastly there is expanded character support for JIS2004 and Hyogaiji.
This all beyond me but must be a good thing. Hyogaiji are characters beyond the official sets taught in schools that are often used in newspapers. JIS2004 appears to be the standard for the glyph shapes of printed kanji. From what I can see 168 characters from the previous standard have been slightly changed. It’s interesting to see this evolution but they don’t seem to be common characters.

What’s missing?
Handwriting recognition. I’d really like to be able to use a tablet to input kanji. Windows can do it to a limited extent in the IME why not Mac? In fact Nintendo DS can do it. They licensed a really good handwriting recognition software from Decuma. (It also used to be included with Sony Clies) I wish Apple or a third party would license it for the Mac.

Voices. Again Windows wins out here. There are some supurb and inexpensive 16bit voices available for Windows. If only Mac could implement the SAPI5 standard, which seems to be where voice technology has gone leaving MacInTalk behind.

But regardless of these missing features, I find Leopard a really good place to work in Japanese.

Related posts:

1. Mac OSX
2. Japanese Spellcheck
3. Maniackers Design Fonts

NoteBook 2.1 from Circus Ponies Software

I use my MacBook a lot to learn Japanese. I’ve got so many clippings from websites, stray urls, little notes I’ve written scattered all over my harddrive. I’ve also got loads of barely organised pieces of paper with notes. The solution? NoteBook!

This is a very clever idea. On the face of it this program is a sort of a notebook with divided sections, but when you look closer there’s so much more. It automatically indexes everything you put in it for starters. As a clippings book it will keep the formatting and pictures of a web page you clip to it and keep the url so you can go back to the original. You can set up a clippings System Service in OSX that will clip highlighted items to your notebook. You could have multiple notebooks to clip into. I have this service on my contextual menus using OpenMenu X. This way it’s very simple to copy anything on my computer into my notebook. Interesting webpages, interesting search results in my dictionary, whatever I want.

I can also write direcly into Notebook as a set of expandble entries. Entries can be linked to each other, rearranged, linked to webpages, highlighted, I’ve only scratched the surface so far.

I might not be that much better at study but at least I can now find things again more easily.

If you find it interesting the best place to start is looking at the video tour on their site which will explain things more clearly than I can.

Related posts:

1. Skim those pdf notes!
2. Kanji Sieve 0.5 released
3. FileMaker Kanji Project – progress 2

Skim 0.7

I came across this useful little program for the Mac today. It’s a pdf reader that allows you to add notes and marks to a pdf file.

I carry my laptop much more often than I carry my class notes. So what I do is scan in the handouts I get in class and annotate them so I have a ready reference without carrying large amounts of paper around. (It might be possible to OCR the handouts but I’ve never needed this step.) It’s also possible to make them searchable if you annotate them properly.

The drawbacks (or maybe it’s just a feature) are that the notes and marks are not part of the pdf so other readers won’t be able to display them. So if you want to share a marked up document the other person will need to use Skim as well. I’ve found that notes added in another program won’t open and as yet I’ve had no success with the line/arrow tool.

What I particulary like about this program is it’s layout of panes and the ability to set what font and size you want the notes in. I always found the fixed size in other programs too small to read kanji notes. Best of all it’s free

Related posts:

1. Organise your notes
2. Lightway Text
3. Anki – multiplatform flashcard program

Goban is a mac implementation of GNU Go. It is very elegant and much more convenient sometimes that getting out the board and stones. You can play against the program, or use it to play against opponents locally, on the internet or on your LAN.
If you like chess or strategic games I’d recommend you give Go a try.

No related posts.

One of the advantages of a computer based system is you can have more than two sides to a card and can keep track of the ones you know more easily. You can print out your cards if you want and can also export them to an iPod. (But large text files don’t seem to work well on my first generation iPod and are very slow to load and scroll). Another good feature of iflash is that the author keeps a site where he encourages users to upload and download card sets and there are a number of good Japanese sets.

iFlash only costs $15 and I think it’s well worth it.

Related posts:

1. WordChamp – Internet Flashcards
2. Anki – multiplatform flashcard program
3. Flashcards Deluxe 2.7

The only way I found to really learn kana was to write them out again and again until I knew them. It takes about 2 weeks to a month. You should also write them out now and again after you’ve learnt them to keep them fresh in your memory.

Related posts:

1. Self Study Kana Workbook
2. Kanji
3. JLPT3 Roundup

JEDict is my new favorite mac-based dictionary reader.
Again it uses data from the EDICT project like WordLookup, but it’s searches are much more powerful and speedy. It doesn’t only search on the first character. It has single kanji searches so you can find the meaning of individual components. It has a built in user dictionary so you can collect word lists. You can search for kanji you don’t know the reading of by using a radical index. It has a built in web browser that allows you to click on a word and get a translation!!! I liked it so much I upgraded my OS version to 10.4 in order to use it.
On the down side it isn’t as well designed as Word Lookup and I find it a bit cluttered and hard to read sometimes. However I think this will improve. The changes between 4.0 and 4.0.1 addressed a lot of things I found difficult.
It is shareware at a very reasonable $25. The unregistered version is completly usable but doesn’t allow you extra dictionaries.
Version 4 needs OSX 10.4 but version 3.8 will run on OS8 and above. (version 3 isn’t as full featured however)

Related posts:

1. Computer Dictionaries
2. PAdict
3. WordLookup