WaKan Project Website

[yokosuberi]

I would like to start learning Korean and would like to see it supported on Wakan. I could easily compile an English-Korean dictionary file for it. One could easily compile dictionary files for other languages as well. So, why not add support for all languages or at least have a plug-in feature where you can add the flags of different countries where the respective languages are spoken? Good idea, easily programmable, so why not?
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ヨコスベリ

[wakan]

I think there are already a lot of dictionaries which you can use for learning Korean. Wakan is only suitable for languages that use Chinese characters, because the cross-reference to characters and many other character-oriented features are really deeply tied within Wakan.

[tony]

I agree that WaKan would lose its focus if it branched out to languages which are not based on Chinese characters.

Korean, however, does use Chinese characters (called hanja in this context) for some words, especially in older documents. It would be a fairly large task to add support for hangul (the rather elegant phonetic spelling system for Korean), however, unless open source code could be incorporated from elsewhere.

Unfortunately, I do not think that there are nearly as many Korean dictionaries on the web as there are for Japanese and Chinese.

--Tony

[wakan]

Yes, besides the unavailability of the dictionary there is the question to Korean learners: does it really make sense for learner of Korean to associate Korean words with character? If not, then I don't think Wakan can be really useful for learning that language.

[tony]

Yokosuberi,

You may want to take a look at the CJKV-English dictionary web site,

http://www.buddhism-dict.net/dealt/

This gives Korean, Japanese and Chinese readings for characters. (It prompts for a user name and password at some point, but seems willing to accept Guest and an empty password, at least for browsing the dictionary-- there is scholarly information at the site as well which may have restricted access.)

At one time, the data in this dictionary were available to the public for download, but this no longer seems to be the case, so I assume that there are licensing issues involved.

--Tony

[tony]

Yokosuberi,

I forgot that WaKan can already display Korean readings of characters in the character details window.

Do a "Settings..." command on the "Tools" menu, click the "Character Details" tab, click the "Add" button, select "Korean Reading" in the "Item" combo box, and click the "OK" button.

I know this is only a small part of what you really want-- you want a database of whole words, and not just hanja-- but I wanted to make sure that you know that at least this much is available in WaKan as it stands.

Note to Filip: "Korean Reading" doesn't appear in the combo box to the right of the "Other" field in the search controls on the Characters screen. Is this just an oversight, or is there a reason that searching by "Korean Reading" would not work?

--Tony

[wright14]

"I feel that out of all languages with Chinese influence Korean would be most suitable to include in the Wakan programme"

In a university in Seoul I found books that were astonishingly hanzi heavy. Upon consulting with a friend, I was told that prior to circa 1994 the use of Hanzi in textbooks and formal writings became strong, and that a total flip-round occurred when their use came to be seen as a snobbish show of educational standard. This explains their absence only from recently published text books, and is a clear sign of nation striving to found its identity--beneath the weight of persistant foreign influence by superpower nations, and the near 'annihilation' that occurred here...

However, this is really a classic example of water in a glass, I think.

The situation will most certainly balance out in a few years, and for this reason I would like to assert that Korean--of all languages with historical Chinese incluence--would be the most suitable for including in the Wakan programme--a formiddable asset already among programmes in dealing with Chinese characters.

`*some further insider information. Though every Korean child quakes at having to learn Chinese charaters, it is however still compulsory in school. And though they are not used in usual writing, there is peculiar fluency and desire to in write and recognise names in hanzi.

Many regards,

(for myself: With few efficient choices available, I have appropriated high-school produced hanzi material here [Seoul] for use in my own studies. The process is made enlightening specifically from the cross-learning that can be done with Japanese--since most of the characters between the two countries still share similar form)

[tony]

wright14,

It would be very nice if WaKan could support Korean. However, as mentioned earlier in this topic, there are some technical hurdles which would make it very difficult to provide Korean support in WaKan.

The main problem is that we don't know of a public domain dictionary for Korean which could be incorporated into WaKan. Since WaKan is distributed for free, it has to depend on freely available sources of information; if Jim Breen's excellent EDICT dictionary didn't exist, WaKan could never have been made available to the public in the first place, and Chinese support would have been impossible if CEDICT, the Chinese dictionary inspired by EDICT, had not been created and made publically available. As far as we know, there is no comparable dictionary available in the public domain for Korean. Note that there are no example sentences available for Chinese for the same reason: no publically available file that we know of.

But WaKan incorporates other sources of information as well, all of which are either public domain, or have been generously offered for free use in WaKan by their authors. Unless someone can provide us with information about comparable sources for Korean, there is no way WaKan can support Korean. We would probably also need to find public domain algorithms for handling hangul.

--Tony

[Tom Hodgers]

Hi all,

Anyone interested in a Japanese-Korean dictionary can download the latest version (May 1 2007) of the Free KJ_dict from:

http://hyam.dip.jp/hiroshi/comp/kj_dict/download_en.html (source code also available).

For screen-shots on English PC, take a look at the following thread :

http://wakan.manga.cz/forum/viewtopic.php?t=562&highlight=korean

Cheers,

Tom

p.s. Those using MACS might want to try out the Free Miyuki Korean-Japanese Dictionary 1.0 from:
http://wsidecar.apple.com/cgi-bin/nph-reg3rdpty2.pl/product=09269&cat=36&platform=osx&method=sa/miyuki.wdgt.zip
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Just another
和漢 WAKAN
若人 WHACKO DOing his thing

[tony]

Tom,

Thanks for the information. I somehow missed the end of the conversation in topic 562, and didn't realize that you and hyam (the author of kj_dict) had announced its availability some time ago.

I will take a look at the source code, make my best guess at how much would be involved in incorporating it into WaKan (I can only guess, since I have never seen the source code for WaKan), and talk to hyam if it seems like it is at all doable.

Filip, perhaps this would be a motivation for going open source with the WaKan code? I don't know where your thinking is at present on that issue. But my guess is that Korean support would be a large job, and might be more likely to get done if there were other programmers involved in writing the code.

--Tony

[wakan]

Hi everybody,

the only real technical problem like Tony already mentioned is the absence of necessary dictionaries (or at least I don't know about them). Specificially, I would need an english-korean dictionary WITH characters included (eg. where not only hangeul but also hanja writing would be included).

Also, please note that including korean is not an easy task. For example, besides some UI changes I would need to code korean romanization routines (eg.latin<->hangeul), include support for korean fonts, etc. Therefore, the real question is, would korean learners REALLY benefit from the hanzi-centric approach of Wakan. Would they use it in larger numbers? I'm quite in doubt in this question...

Filip