Kanji of the Day

Because a collection of Curl objects underlies the Kanji by Grade pages at http://www.aule-browser.com/kanji/kanjidic2-grades.html the pages now have a Kanji of the Day feature with only a minimal change (a variable's value replaces a character literal and a procedure is called with two integers to delimit a safe and reasonable range.)

The Kanji character for the session is placed as the default in the search text field. A student clicks the 'Find' button to jump to the definition for that Japanese kanji character.

Within the applet, the kanji character is found by using a factory method on the class Random and a seed from a DateTime instance. The instance of a Random type is likely LinearRandom as Random is itself an abstract  class.

The same class declaration 'scurl' file is included by all of these kanji-by-grade applets.

Note: I also generalized the search function today by using one more instance of GuiMark.

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Kanjidic2 Japanese kanji by School Grade

There is a new set of 12 Curl applets for studying Japanese kanji this morning.

They are linked at http://www.aule-browser.com/kanji/kanjidic2-grades.html

Here is a snapshot of the applet for combined Grade 9 and Grade 10 Japanese kanji from kanjidic2 with meanings and both on and kun readings in katakana and hiragana:

These pages require the MIT Curl Surge RTE browser plug-in from www.curl.com

Varying Joyo kanji order of presentation

re: varying the order of presentation of Joyo kanji definitions without edits of the text original

By using the serialization technique of my last note, the pages from Kanjidic2 can be varied in their order without touching the text original or using a DB.

A Curl applet could use SQLite, MySQL or JSON to achieve the same, but this varying order of presentation can also be accomplished using just the one web language, namely, MIT's Curl from www.curl.com

joyo kanji

I have added a Curl applet with the joyo kanji from the 2010 revision (that's 2136 dictionary entries from kanjidic2.)

I discuss the features over at my Curl Community blog. Here's the short account: suppose you are at 919; enter 40 and press ENTER.  Once the generic "water" kanji displays, the RIGHT INNER button beside the thin top right-arrow will let you "jump back up" to this 919 "window" kanji.

If you instead jump forward by entering 1926, you can "jump back" with the left "inner" button which is beside of the skinny LEFT arrow at the top.

Why the "jumps" ? The code was needed to add "red" and "green" buttons to a list on which to base "spaced-repetition".

A desktop version for Mac, linux or windows is about 24-hours away.

The list is just a CSV file, so you could move the applet to your own machine if you have a simple script in Rebol or the like - but it will then be a local browser page.  The desktop version will use no browser and store ts state in client-side persistent data instead of cookies.

HanaMinA TrueType font

Here is my little Dcurl Kanji app with a better UNICODE Kanji font:

over at kanji.aule-browser.com

Kanjidic2 as CSV in HTML and text

To aid a neutral party in assessing approaches to digital dictionaries for Japanese, I have posted an HTML file displaying 10,000+ of the first entries in Kanjidic2 at

  http://kanji.aule-browser.com/kanjidic2-m12.html

I have restricted the dump to the Kanji, the UCS code and a max of 12 of a possible 14 meanings.

There are less than 10,200 due to the fact that in the first 12,155 entries, many had no XML meaning content which was not assigned a language attribute.  Those few thousand may have English translations in markup previously used for foreign languages.

The file can be found as

  http://kanji.aule-browser.com/kanjidic2-m12.csv

with a three line header which you may have to alter for your purposes.

The Kanjidic2 XML file was parsed using the Curl XDM library from curl.com (Nihon-go http://www.curlap.com)

As it stands, the HTML file should be useful for building custom Anki flashcards (themselves stored as SQLite.)   I will be using variant CSV output to construct dictionary software with annotations and spaced-repetition options.  Curl has both CSV and SQLite libraries in addition to the XML libraries.

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