Two Kanji Day

It is another 2 kanji day at the new 400+ frequent non-jōyō Japanese kanji page at aule-browser.com's kanji home page.

There is one "kanji of the day" in the Curl applet's search pane and the list of kanji is randomized each session so that at least the top character in the list may also strike you as yet another "kanji of the day".

Many of the kanji pages are now using randomized lists, although this will soon be an option for the user to select as a CSPD preference.

The webpage requires the Surge® RTE Curl browser plugin from www.curl.com

The Curl applet is fully packaged with a super-package for AULE and a sub-package for "KANJI" but required some attention to avoid having to use a {define-alias } macro in the applet itself.

The kanji are loaded from a serialized array placed in a bin file and the applet uses a pre-sized FastArray for the content to be displayed.

Difference Proc

Over at http://kanji.aule-browser.com/ I have added a page with the Japanese kanji listed in the top 2500 in kanjidic2 but not in the Joyo kanji list.

This Curl applet is based on serialized array generated from a set-set difference.

The problem that I encountered generating this was that the {value-hash } and {equal } proc's to specifiy element identity in these parameterized sets could not be anon proc's and indeed could not even be class proc's due to a Curl compiler non-compile-time constant complaint.

Contrary to the docs, the proc's must be locally defined and named in the applet with simple {define-proc } macros.

The kanji Curl applet is in an HTML wrapper at http://www.aule-browser.com/kanji/kanjidic2-non-joyo.html and looks as follows:

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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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.