28.01.2004 This is the new official website for KanjiNirvana (kani). Based on the wonderful work of Norbert Siepenkötter, the creator of KanjiNirvana, a group of developpers will now continue the developpment of the tool in a cooperative basis. The old homepage is available at here
Please have a look at Arne Schmidt's excellent page for SL-C700 users, including a solution for problems with the notes handling in KanjiNirvana on this device. Thanks Arne!
New in v1.3:
- new quiz algorithm
- various fixes
New in v1.2:
- Change to the Hits field to allow owners of A300 to enter a kanji with the native input methods
New in v1.1:
- Integration with QTReader
- some bugfixes
KanjiNirvana is a kanji reference and learning tool for Sharp's SL5x00 and A300 Zaurus PDA's. It is aimed at students of the
japanese language and anyone else who is interested in japanese characters.
One of the many difficulties students of the japanese language have to cope
with, is the huge number of unique characters (kanji) they have to
memorize. Everyone who has tried to learn japanese knows the problem: When
reading a text you very often encounter a kanji you haven't memorized yet and
a lot of time has to be spend finding the character in a kanji dictionary. After
finding it you normally would like to memorize it, so that you don't have to
look it up again and again.
KanjiNirvana combines a flexible kanji lookup method
with a simple kanji quiz for memorizing to help with these two common tasks.
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
To find a kanji, you simply fill out one or more of the search criteria:
Radicals:
Kanji are composed of one ore more smaller components, its radicals.
Pressing the radicals-button opens up a table with the 214 radicals,
ordered by their stroke count. By choosing one ore more of them the
search can be limited to those kanji that contain these radicals.
(Handwritten Character Recognition):
Pressing this button will open up a canvas where you can scribble down the
character and let the HCR-algorithm identify it. Even though the algorithm has
some limitations, this works surprisingly well if you know the stroke order and
stroke number of the kanji (which usually follow some simple rules) :)
Stroke count (S#):
If you can identify the number of strokes the kanji consists of you can enter
it in the Stroke count field to limit the search to this stroke count.
kun/ON/name reading:
Most kanji have several japanese readings and the reading field can be used
to narrow the search to those kanji with the given reading. Text entered in this
field will be automatically transformed to hiragana/katakana.
English:
Use this field if you know the english meaning of the kanji.
Jouyou grade:
Some kanji are graded by their difficulty. Use this field to narrow the search
to these grades.
Frequency of use:
For the 2,135 most common kanji a 'Frequency of use' ranking exist. You can
limit the search to a range of the frequency.
Codes:
Many different codes exist for each kanji. If you want to look up a kanji by
one of its codes you can do it with this field.
All the kanji that fit into the chosen search criteria ar displayed in the Hits
field. If there isn't enough space in the Hits field to display all the Hits, you
can page through them with the arrow buttons at the right of the Hits field.
Above the arrows the total number of Hits, the momentary visible page and the
total number of pages is displayed.
If you have found the kanji you are looking for in the Hits field, tap it with
the stylus. The kanji and its english meaning are display in the Info area at the
top of the main screen.
Now you have the option to display more info about the kanji by pressing the
kanji's button, to copy or paste it and to enter it into the kanji quiz by checking
the checkbox next to the quiz-button.
By pressing the kanji's button in the info area of the main screen the Kanji Info window is invoked.
This page displays all the info about the chosen kanji. Additionally you can
enter some personal comments about this kanji in the Notes field at the bottom of
the window. This can be used for example to enter recognizing mnemonics like
the Henshall Mnemonics ( http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/henshall_mnem.html)
or anything else that helps you remembering this particular kanji.
Back on the main screen, the quiz button brings you to a simple kanji quiz. On
the settings tab you can choose which info should be shown to you: the kanji
itself, its readings, its english meaning and/or your notes about this kanji.
All the kanji that have their quiz-checkboxes checked on the main screen are
included in the quiz and can be found in the 'Kanji in quiz' field. Edit this field
or use the 'clear all' or 'add' buttons to change the contents of the quiz.
On the lower part of the quiz tab is the answer area, where you can scribble
down the kanji, its reading or what else you have chosen to be asked for.
KanjiNirvana can be called as a kanji dictionary from inside Tim Wentford's excellent e-text reader QTReader (http://www.timwentford.uklinuxnet.net). Just tap on the kanji in QTReader to get the english meaning. To enable this all you have to do is to enter the string 'kani/query' in QTReaders dictionary settings. Thanks Tim!
Of course KanjiNirvana (among other japanese dictionary programs) does only
exist, because many people, especially Prof. Jim Breen provided the excellent
kanji database files. Thanks a lot for this great work and for releasing it free
for noncommercial use! (Please see http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/edict.html
for copyright and general information)
Another big Thanks goes out to Owen Taylor
for his kanjipad program, based on the work of Todd David Rudick and Robert Wells.
Its translation engine for the handwriting-recognition could be used without changing
a single line of code for KanjiNirvana! Very cool...!
Thanks also to the Trolltech team for providing the great Qt package! I used Qt
for the first time in this project and I really was pleasently
surprised about the ease of use und very good documentation!
The files kanjidic, romkana and raddat are
the dictionary source files. You will only need them if you want to rebuild the
internal KanjiNirvana dictionary. They are not necessary for normal use.
The file kaninotes holds the user written kanji notes and can be edited from
inside KanjiNirvana (at the info page) or with any unicode capable texteditor.
All these files are located in $QPEDIR/kani/ , but doclnks are created in the
Documents/text/plain folder.
KanjiNirvana is memory hungry. If you get frequent 'out of memory' warnings I
recommend turning off the fast load option for other applications (press and hold
on the application's icon). If you encounter strange problems when running
KanjiNirvana, an incomplete installation due to memory shortage might be the
reason. Unfortunately the Qtopia install application doesn't report such errors...
