WaKan Project Website

[z-one]

[tony]

That's pretty much how the WaKan EDICT importing function behaves, and it often drove me crazy not being able to find out what it was doing, especially as there were a couple of genuine bugs in addition to the UI problems. If Tom is up to importing updates of EDICT into WaKan, he shouldn't have any significant problems importing Tanaka corpus updates into zKanji.

[Tom Hodgers]

Yes Tony,

That's exactly what I've been doing all along. Every month or so, I import the latest version of the EDICT dictionaries. I had problems ages ago (a couple of years ago everything ran slow and used to freeze up) but I resolved the problem with more RAM on one of my PC's.

I just wondered If Zoltan had a similar (better) program as I didn't know he would be updating the Tanaka Corpus data file on a regular basis.

Cheers,

Tom
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Just another
和漢 WAKAN
若人 WHACKO DOing his thing

[tony]

Zoli,

I tried to send the message below to your e-mail address (I just used the reply to sender mechanism), but it bounced, with the reason:

Reason: Remote SMTP server has rejected address

I checked in Henshall, and 吏 and 史 are in fact historically unrelated,
despite their similarity in appearance. Surprisingly, 吏 is historically
related to early forms of 事. So one can't always go by visual appearance.

I don't understand your complaint about the parts making up a kanji. They are not intended to be radicals or kanji; there is a separate data type for graphemes of which kanji are a special case. (I've forgotten what they're called now.) The graphemes often do contribute similar meanings to different kanji, even though they are not kanji on their own. So they are useful to know for that reason, and they are also helpful to remember as units for writing more complicated kanji. And in some (but not all) cases, they are characters on their own in Chinese.

--Tony

[z-one]

I know that many kanji were simplified and changed in appearance, and I have seen cases when a kanji was changed to a completely different form that seems to go against tradition. (It's their writing so I won't complain.) I don't have a book about this so I won't start changing the data just yet.

It's hard to explain my "problem" with Taka without showing examples, but you will see it in the program soon. It won't be final, I just need users' opinion.

[z-one]

The latest version is up on the zkanji homepage! It is version v0.179.

This version includes:

• Updated JMDict and Tanaka corpus. (optional :p)
  
• Parts of kanji (other kanji or radicals found in a character) and parents of kanji (kanji that contain the given character).
  
• The kanji window can be enlarged to see stroke order and details.
  
• Bug fixes. (Yes, there are still plenty.)

From this version you can import the Tanaka Corpus if you add the following lines to zkanji.ini:
[Debug]
debug=1

About bug fixes: There were lots of bugs that only occurred with given settings, this is why I haven't found them up till now. Because of two of these bugs, the ini file was incorrectly saved in some circumstances causing even more problems when starting zkanji the next time. I hope that all those errors were fixed that caused such behavior.

The only features missing from zkanji (concerning my original idea) are all connected with kanji cards. The one is the kanji card creation itself (I want the user to be able to select the words on it and even add his/her own definitions.) An other feature I'm thinking about is some kind of smart kanji card printing with lots of settings. And finally kanji drills.
Because adding these doesn't sound fast and easy, I can't promise they will be included soon. Instead, I'm thinking about writing a detailed "online help" that lists those functions in zkanji that are not so easy to discover by new users. But I have to warn you: I have absolutely no experience in this kind of work.

Tony advised me to change some wordings in zkanji because "groups" and "lists" can sometimes be confused in my usage (in hints, labels). I will do that too while writing the online help when an explanation cannot be made clear without it.

This all means that there will be no big additions to zkanji in the near future, but I will continue to fix bugs and upload the fixed versions when it's needed.
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ZKanji, kanji and vocabulary study program.

[tony]

Zoli,

Thanks for all of your hard work. I will be happy to proofread/edit the help pages if you want. Are you thinking in terms of web pages or a Windows-style help file, or some other kind of document?

By the way, Taka の Benoit Cerrina has just signed up as a user at the studyjapanese.org web site, so you can reach him by finding him on the user list (benwulf, I think) and using the site's e-mail form to send him a message. That is, if you aren't already in contact with him.

--Tony

[z-one]

I will write web pages because that's the easiest for me. I don't want to spend time learning a different system. There is not a big difference and I plan to add a zip file to download so no-one will have to use the internet for help.

I haven't yet contacted him and I don't remember having signed up to studyjapanese.org yet either, but I'll do if I hadn't.

*Edit* Why do these bugs always pop up when it's already late? (If nobody minds I remove zkanji for 10 minutes and upload a fix without changing the version number)

**Fixed
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ZKanji, kanji and vocabulary study program.

[z-one]

New version available. I have fixed bugs as usual but also written dictionary import. You can now work together with others to build your own dictionary! The import checks for words already present and zkanji also has a number of ways to handle differences in the current and the imported dictionary.

Grab it from the usual address!
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ZKanji, kanji and vocabulary study program.

[z-one]

There is once again another new version. I have changed many unnoticeable things so it is not such an important update, but this is the first step towards the kanji studies!
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ZKanji, kanji and vocabulary study program.

[z-one]

New version that fixes some bugs (and adds other bugs). Get it from the project's home!
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ZKanji, kanji and vocabulary study program.

[z-one]

I have copied the home of zkanji to another free host, because some people complained about interrupted downloads. The new site is at: http://zkanji.site40.net/
*EDIT* They promise 24h up-time but the site just doesn't want to load every now and then. I might change my mind about this. Please contact me, if you know a good free hosting!

(I won't delete the old site yet, but I might do it later.)
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ZKanji, kanji and vocabulary study program.

[shinyclef]

Dees zKanji include a feature where you can paste in a sentence, and then it looks up whichever word the curser is at the start of? That's one of the main things I like about wakan. If zKanji can do this, I might make a switch just cause Wakan doesn't seem to be supported anymore.

Would you consider putting it in zKanji?

[z-one]

I have been around here a long time ago and I'm not about to present a new version yet, but I don't want people to believe I have given up with this project. Currently I'm working on and testing the kanji training part of zkanji, which I already use for a month now. Because of the nature of the spaced repetition systems it will be some time till I get real results of it's accuracy and I don't want to just upload the program half ready.
Thank you for your patience.

shinyclef:
Sorry for being late with the answer. zkanji doesn't have a word editor like wakan does, but it has a "clipboard" functionality instead where the whole clipboard can be viewed, not just a single line. zkanji doesn't automatically recognize the words either, but you can select part of the text and it shows their translation in the dictionary. This is not as smart as the editor in wakan.
I haven't added a better version simply because I could never use this in wakan successfully. It's not perfect either and it was more troublesome for me when it couldn't give the real translation to some words than how useful it could have been otherwise.
I can't promise that I will implement anything similar but I will consider it.
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ZKanji, kanji and vocabulary study program.

[z-one]

It's been a long time since I have last updated, but I just uploaded the latest version of zkanji. You can get it either from here or here!

The first version of the kanji study is fully functional, though I plan to include several different kind of other tests. I have also recieved some requests regarding features, like importing wakan vocabulary files or searching in the example sentences, which I want to work on too.
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ZKanji, kanji and vocabulary study program.