しあわせ

Two years ago mixi started requiring a Japanese email address in order to sign up to mixi. It seems that what they are doing is filtering for undesirable domains. Hence google mail etc are being barred, Japanese keitai are not.
Koichi at Tofugu has found an apparent crack in mixi’s filters. dot-edu domain addresses are not being blocked. (for the moment). Which is good news if you have a .edu email address. He has even found a way to get a .edu address via an Australian site. Details can be found on Tofugu.
Apparently (I haven’t checked) .ac.uk addresses work as well.
You also don’t need an invite to join mixi anymore according to Tofugu. But play nice please; mixi is different from Facebook et al. and the social conventions around friend requests are different.
I wouldn’t liken it to the Black Ships yet. No one is forcing mixi to open up (and no-one should really). More like some Jesuits being snuck in.

This is a little FileMaker solution I’ve written.
It takes a piece of pasted Japanese text and analyses the kanji contained in it.

I wrote it as a quick and probably imprecise way of looking at kanji usage in texts. Probably because of the 1998 study of kanji usage in the Asahi Shinbun (Shinbun denshi media no kanji, Senseido, 1998) usually a figure is quoted of 1000 most frequent kanji account for 95% of usage. I have also seen this as 1000 characters allow you to read 95% of articles (a subtle difference) but I think this is a bit of an overstatement, (the thread below suggests 1900 kanji in order to read 95% of compounds). While doing a bit of research on this I came across several other frequency studies and an interesting thread where Jim Breen notes

…a discussion at a language teaching conference in Japan I attended in 1999, where there was general consensus that
the average Japanese adult could read 700-800 kanji…

Although I find this a bit hard to imagine, write by hand maybe…

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Or outside of Japan the DSi XL. But a friend has brought me a Japanese DSi LL a month or so ahead of the European launch. Who needs an Apple iPad?
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These books have the usual unwieldy titles of so many Japanese books.
1行読んでおぼえる小学生必修1006漢字—低学年500漢字 and 1行読んでおぼえる小学生必修1006漢字—高学年506漢字. The idea behind them is quite simple though. You read one line per kanji to memorise if not all, at least most of its important readings. It’s similar to books written for Japanese second language learners like JLPT3 Kanji by Examples and JLPT2 Kanji by Examples.
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I’ve started making my Kanji Notebook.

The first week has seen me gather a lot of the basic data I want, some of it imported using XLST such as Kanjidic, some of it input by hand, some from tab separated files.

So I have the data on all the kanji I could want. I decided only to import the data I was interested in so many of the dictionaries and Heisig didn’t make the cut, nor did Spanish, French, Korean or Chinese. I might import this data later and allow it to be toggled on and off. One of the many reasons I’m doing this is that current dictionaries don’t display want I want how I want or give far too much information.

The radicals were only given as a number so I needed to make a table of the radical names and sub-classify a number of them. Then I needed to input an index from Basic Kanji Book vols 1 and 2 by Chieko Kano. I also put in an option to override Kanjidic’s keyword (too often derived from Heisig and too ambiguous) and use your own keyword or one from the Kanji Learners Dictionary if you input it using the index number for ease of lookup.
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Long ago before I started learning Japanese, FileMaker Pro was one of my favourite programs. Then I started spending most of my time on Japanese and FileMaker was sidelined, especially as it didn’t support Japanese characters at that time. It’s interesting though, I get the same fun from learning Japanese as I did when I solved a problem using FileMaker.

Lately I’ve taken a look at the Kanjidic2 XML file. I’d like to do a little more than a standard dictionary search. The various sites and standalones don’t quite do what I’d like. I’d like to be able to pull out the data for which JLPT2 kanji are also Grade 4 for instance. I’d like to add my own notes, set up my own cross references, link it to Kradfile, link it to websites, get rid of the most annoying Heisig definitions (old-boy for 君 springs to mind). I have ideas for kanji learning I’d like to integrate. Although I wonder if I won’t have Yet Another Japanese Dictionary Reader in what is already a crowded market.

Anyhow to start to do this I need to put it into a database. FileMaker is the only real candidate to do what I want easily. Read the rest of this entry »