WaKan Project Website

[Guest]

The program Wenlin was very helpful to me when I learned how to read, write, and correctly pronounce the Chinese language.

Does anybody know if there are any such programs for teaching Japanese with as many features and high quality and calibur as Wenlin? Or perhaps a combination of programs added together to provide such organized learning? It doesn't have to be free, as Wenlin was certainly far from inexpensive, but definitely worth the price.

Some features are listed here. http://www.wenlin.com/wenlin1.htm

These features include instant Chinese to English dictionary, stroke order in terms of writing, groups of sorted words including a list of most frequently used words in the language, typing English words and finding Chinese words with equal meaning, ability of "drawing" the word to search for it in the database (using a pen tablet or mouse), and very accurate written pronunciation as well as audio pronunciation of almost every word in Chinese.

Please help if possible. Thanks!

[tony]

Most programs for Japanese have either no pronunciation of words, or not very good pronunciation. The best text-to-speech I have heard is the "Voice of Japan" program, but I'm not sure it's even being sold any more, and all of its other features were pretty lame (WaKan is ten times as good for dictionary lookup or kanji lookup).

Tejina and LexiKan feature "handwritten" input of single characters, but not of entire words. Tejina gives you a list of possible matches after each stroke you enter (there are fewer and fewer as you go on), and you can select one of the possibilities at any time. LexiKan "autocorrects" the strokes as you enter them.

Apart from those two features, everything else you listed can be done pretty well with WaKan. WaKan does not have a function to search for a given text string in a collection of text files, but I don't think it would be hard to add. I'll suggest it in the Feature Request forum.

--Tony

[Guest]

Tony, thank you for your comments.

In regards to most commonly used Japanese words, would anybody have any idea if this site is any good?

http://www.nuthatch.com/kanjicards/index.html

Please help if possible. Thanks!