On Greek goddess and Japanese language

As I have written last year, I am studying Japanese. Since I am a lazy and my memory is not perfect, I have managed to fail JLPT Level 4 if only by extremely narrow margin. Nevertheless, I am a stubborn bastard and I am continuing my study this year.

On my way, I have managed to find some new tools. And since good part of traffic volume on my blog resulted from people coming to read the post on little programs useful for studying Japanese (thanks to Demencia who put it on StumbleUpon!), I have decided to share them with you here.

The programs that I will present in this post all serve to memorise Kanji (I assume that if you are reading this, you already know what Kanji is). They all apply same approach, namely “spaced repetition” in order to maximise learning curve. In short, a program using it is throwing at a user more often the questions to which they don’t remember the responses well, while the questions that are dealt with well occur less frequently. The purpose is to strenghten weak memory associations by increasing the number of repetitions and maintain strong ones by only occasional reminders.

The programs in question are Anki, Mnemosyne and SuperMemo. Out of the three, I’ve only heard earlier about SuperMemo – my brother used it to great effect when he was studying French. However it’s poor user interface design reminding me of Windows 95 times was putting me off from using it. I know it’s irrational, but something looking so primitively is for me less credible.

I actually started with Anki, the program with most features. I’ve found it thanks to my friend Guillaume, who is living happily in Nippon (you can read his blog here) and has contributed to Anki’s development by creating custom JLPT-oriented sentences and vocabulary. The problem was, I somehow didn’t fall in love with Anki. One or two annoying glitches spoiled the fun for me, I got lost with its many options and strange terminology and I stopped using it.

I started looking for some more user-friendly alternative and I have stumbled upon this great discussion and comparison of all three programs available at Nihon-go Pera Pera. I am not going to rewrite it here, just follow the link in question, but I have finally found what I was searching for. The answer was: Mnemosyne.

While more advanced users might need more options that Anki provides and some retro-maniacs will have a ton of fun using SuperMemo, for me Mnemosyne is the golden middle: useful, not overly complicated with simple interface. Okay, the plain UI might be prettier, but it’s still nowhere near as fugly as SuperMemo. Plus it has a cool Greek name.

Your opinion may be different , so please read the article in question and make your own decision – I just wanted to point out the existence of these tools to you and provide the link to the very informative discussion of all three of them.

Now, the question remains if I will have enough willpower to use Mnemosyne regularly…

On Greek goddess and Japanese language

As I have written last year, I am studying Japanese. Since I am a lazy and my memory is not perfect, I have managed to fail JLPT Level 4 if only by extremely narrow margin. Nevertheless, I am a stubborn bastard and I am continuing my study this year.

On my way, I have managed to find some new tools. And since good part of traffic volume on my blog resulted from people coming to read the post on little programs useful for studying Japanese (thanks to Demencia who put it on StumbleUpon!), I have decided to share them with you here.

The programs that I will present in this post all serve to memorise Kanji (I assume that if you are reading this, you already know what Kanji is). They all apply same approach, namely “spaced repetition” in order to maximise learning curve. In short, a program using it is throwing at a user more often the questions to which they don’t remember the responses well, while the questions that are dealt with well occur less frequently. The purpose is to strenghten weak memory associations by increasing the number of repetitions and maintain strong ones by only occasional reminders.

The programs in question are Anki, Mnemosyne and SuperMemo. Out of the three, I’ve only heard earlier about SuperMemo – my brother used it to great effect when he was studying French. However it’s poor user interface design reminding me of Windows 95 times was putting me off from using it. I know it’s irrational, but something looking so primitively is for me less credible.

I actually started with Anki, the program with most features. I’ve found it thanks to my friend Guillaume, who is living happily in Nippon (you can read his blog here) and has contributed to Anki’s development by creating custom JLPT-oriented sentences and vocabulary. The problem was, I somehow didn’t fall in love with Anki. One or two annoying glitches spoiled the fun for me, I got lost with its many options and strange terminology and I stopped using it.

I started looking for some more user-friendly alternative and I have stumbled upon this great discussion and comparison of all three programs available at Nihon-go Pera Pera. I am not going to rewrite it here, just follow the link in question, but I have finally found what I was searching for. The answer was: Mnemosyne.

While more advanced users might need more options that Anki provides and some retro-maniacs will have a ton of fun using SuperMemo, for me Mnemosyne is the golden middle: useful, not overly complicated with simple interface. Okay, the plain UI might be prettier, but it’s still nowhere near as fugly as SuperMemo. Plus it has a cool Greek name.

Your opinion may be different , so please read the article in question and make your own decision – I just wanted to point out the existence of these tools to you and provide the link to the very informative discussion of all three of them.

Now, the question remains if I will have enough willpower to use Mnemosyne regularly…

Status update – iPhone hacking, Japanese, Ubuntu on M200

This time instead of pitifully justifying my absence, I will just briefly let you know what has been devouring my time :

- I try to revise Japanese for my JLPT exam. Due to other activities this is not going well and I am probably going to fail it. Here are some cool pages that are very helpful when studying Japanese : Kanji test, Kanji reference, Japanese Word of the Day.

- I bought Toshiba M200 tablet on Ebay. Great piece of hardware and I have been secretly lusting for a tablet for a long time. I intend to use it for digital drawing and also it is small enough to carry around. I am setting it up for use, making it dual-boot with Ubuntu. This is time-consuming as hell.

- I bought iPhone. Yes, you heard that right. I have already hacked the activation lock (following this excellent tutorial), but still am struggling with hacking SIM cards and installing extra software (yay for BSD subsystem!).

- Programming a 2D game engine in SDL for a game we are working on with Bellamy, who currently is working in Japan. You have read the post about XML library – that was just one step on the way to create a full 2D alpha version of the game.

- There has been an outburst of PSP games recently : Castlevania, Silent Hill Origins, Syphon Filter : Logan’s Shadow, Manhunt 2 (with the whole story behind it, including creating uncensored version).

- Also, my private life has suddenly exploded (to paraphrase Leonard Cohen). Not at all computer related, but also time-consuming.

The bottom line is that probably it will take a while for the next post to appear.

Little programs to help you with Japanese

This post is going to be a little less entertainment-centred than the majority of recent posts, instead of games I will describe a couple of really useful utilities related to Japanese.

I myself am studying Japanese., but I am not very proficient with it yet. I do realise that it is a difficult task, yet my ever-growing infatuation with Japan has driven me to make a significant effort and force my grey cells to memorise convoluted structures, forms and writing of Nihon-go.

Having said that, it is not easy. Especially writing is something that is overwhelming at first. In the beginning katakana, hiragana and kanji seem to be impossible to ever memorise, especially the latter. I already know kana, but I still am struggling with kanji. I think that to master more than a couple hundreds one has to spend some time living in Japan, otherwise it is too hard – but maybe I am just looking for excuses to my own inability to properly memorise kanji.

Being a computer geek (to some extent at least), I couldn’t overlook the occasion of boosting my learning process with any digital crutch I could use. The following programs and utilities are the result of my searches – I have found them to be useful and thought I would share the compilation, so that you don’t have to look for them yourself.

DreamKana

DreamKana is one of the simplest programs to study kana. But its simplicity is its main advantage, right next to being free of charge (don’t we all love free software?). Basically it just displays kana characters and asks user to type in their romaji reading. Simple and effective, I know quite a lot of students that used this while preparing for JLPT Level 4. Also, it doesn’t require installation, which together with its small size makes it a perfect candidate for portable tool on your USB pendrive.

LearnKana

This program is very similar to DreamKana, but it is more configurable. Its main advantage is the possibility to choose a specific group of kana that user would like to practice. It also shows the hit/miss ratio (good answers vs bad answers), which gives some idea about how well user has already mastered the material. Nice and simple utility. Apparently there are some new versions that have appeared, but I didn’t really have the time to check them.

PSPKanji

I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t put some PSP homebrew in here. Essentially, PSPKanji (which I have already described here) allows user to work with kanji flashcards. It also has kana tables available at the press of the button and quiz options for revising purposes. Recent version has some slight graphical glitches, but nevertheless it is a very useful little program (plus it has very nice visual style). Kudos to Sammy who created it!

Wakan

This is a very powerful tool – basically a kanji dictionary with lots of configuration options and customised searches, such as based on radicals. Essential program for everybody seriously studying Japanese (or Chinese, too), especially for JLPT, since Wakan has lists of JLPT kanji for each level. Works well under Linux through Wine – tested it under Ubuntu.

Rikaichan – Firefox plugin

This excellent plugin shows pop-up window with the dictionary definition of given kanji that has been highlighted in the browser window. This greatly simplifies finding the meaning of that kanji, which would otherwise take significantly longer. The description is short, but this is a very powerful tool. Its main problem is that it is dependent on the quality of dictionaries used and Japanese-French dictionary seems to be more accurate than Japanese-English one.

Japanese Katakana Hiragana scroller – Yahoo Widget

Despite its name, this widget only displays hiragana with their romaji readings (well, actually it does English-Portugese/German/French pairs too), and I haven’t found a way to force it to display katakana (if you know how to, let me know through comments). User can select refresh intervals, thus being able to have his memory tickled all the time by changing hiragana characters. Personally, I found it very useful while learning kana.

Jenerator – Yahoo Widget

This little widget displays random Japanese words and expressions, many of them taken from common everyday situations. It is not very helpful when revising some particular material, but nevertheless by constant bombarding with kanji allows user to retain some of them. For consideration.

Katakana Stroke Order – Yahoo Widget

This widget presents the correct stroke order for katakana characters. There also exists a very similar widget for hiragana stroke order. Useful when beginning learning kana, but also when user needs to refresh the correct stroke order later on. A very nice little tool.

Little programs to help you with Japanese

This post is going to be a little less entertainment-centred than the majority of recent posts, instead of games I will describe a couple of really useful utilities related to Japanese.

I myself am studying Japanese., but I am not very proficient with it yet. I do realise that it is a difficult task, yet my ever-growing infatuation with Japan has driven me to make a significant effort and force my grey cells to memorise convoluted structures, forms and writing of Nihon-go.

Having said that, it is not easy. Especially writing is something that is overwhelming at first. In the beginning katakana, hiragana and kanji seem to be impossible to ever memorise, especially the latter. I already know kana, but I still am struggling with kanji. I think that to master more than a couple hundreds one has to spend some time living in Japan, otherwise it is too hard – but maybe I am just looking for excuses to my own inability to properly memorise kanji.

Being a computer geek (to some extent at least), I couldn’t overlook the occasion of boosting my learning process with any digital crutch I could use. The following programs and utilities are the result of my searches – I have found them to be useful and thought I would share the compilation, so that you don’t have to look for them yourself.

DreamKana

DreamKana is one of the simplest programs to study kana. But its simplicity is its main advantage, right next to being free of charge (don’t we all love free software?). Basically it just displays kana characters and asks user to type in their romaji reading. Simple and effective, I know quite a lot of students that used this while preparing for JLPT Level 4. Also, it doesn’t require installation, which together with its small size makes it a perfect candidate for portable tool on your USB pendrive.

LearnKana

This program is very similar to DreamKana, but it is more configurable. Its main advantage is the possibility to choose a specific group of kana that user would like to practice. It also shows the hit/miss ratio (good answers vs bad answers), which gives some idea about how well user has already mastered the material. Nice and simple utility. Apparently there are some new versions that have appeared, but I didn’t really have the time to check them.

PSPKanji

I wouldn’t be myself if I didn’t put some PSP homebrew in here. Essentially, PSPKanji (which I have already described here) allows user to work with kanji flashcards. It also has kana tables available at the press of the button and quiz options for revising purposes. Recent version has some slight graphical glitches, but nevertheless it is a very useful little program (plus it has very nice visual style). Kudos to Sammy who created it!

Wakan

This is a very powerful tool – basically a kanji dictionary with lots of configuration options and customised searches, such as based on radicals. Essential program for everybody seriously studying Japanese (or Chinese, too), especially for JLPT, since Wakan has lists of JLPT kanji for each level. Works well under Linux through Wine – tested it under Ubuntu.

Rikaichan – Firefox plugin

This excellent plugin shows pop-up window with the dictionary definition of given kanji that has been highlighted in the browser window. This greatly simplifies finding the meaning of that kanji, which would otherwise take significantly longer. The description is short, but this is a very powerful tool. Its main problem is that it is dependent on the quality of dictionaries used and Japanese-French dictionary seems to be more accurate than Japanese-English one.

Japanese Katakana Hiragana scroller – Yahoo Widget

Despite its name, this widget only displays hiragana with their romaji readings (well, actually it does English-Portugese/German/French pairs too), and I haven’t found a way to force it to display katakana (if you know how to, let me know through comments). User can select refresh intervals, thus being able to have his memory tickled all the time by changing hiragana characters. Personally, I found it very useful while learning kana.

Jenerator – Yahoo Widget

This little widget displays random Japanese words and expressions, many of them taken from common everyday situations. It is not very helpful when revising some particular material, but nevertheless by constant bombarding with kanji allows user to retain some of them. For consideration.

Katakana Stroke Order – Yahoo Widget

This widget presents the correct stroke order for katakana characters. There also exists a very similar widget for hiragana stroke order. Useful when beginning learning kana, but also when user needs to refresh the correct stroke order later on. A very nice little tool.