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Kanji Hanabi
Version 1.8 Release Notes
October 25, 1999Copyright (c) 1996-1999 nethSoft
All Rights Reserved
Thank you for using Kanji Hanabi! I hope it proves to be useful in improving your Japanese skills.
Please send me email at sam@neth.com if you discover bugs in the program, if you find that any of the kanji data is incorrect, or if you have ideas for future enhancements to Kanji Hanabi. For the latest news on Kanji Hanabi, please visit the web site:
http://www.neth.com/hanabi.html
I should point out that Kanji Hanabi is designed to help you learn to recognize kanji in typewritten Japanese. The glyphs used in Kanji Hanabi resemble the fonts used by Japanese publications and computer programs. There are frequently minor differences between this and the way characters are rendered in typical handwritten Japanese.
Kanji Hanabi can be installed on your Pilot the same way that any other add-on application is installed. Note that the kanji database is a separate file that must be loaded onto your Pilot in order for the application to work.
The two files that must be loaded are:
Hanabi.prc
Hanabi.pdb
If you have installed a previous version of Kanji Hanabi, you may need to remove it from your Pilot prior to installing this version.
The trial version of Kanji Hanabi is fully functional, but is restricted to the kanji in the first 2 grades (221 kanji). The complete version includes the kanji in grades 1 through 6 (996 kanji), and is available for $50US. Purchasing Kanji Hanabi will of course entitle you for some period to automatic upgrades as new versions are released.
I hope to someday release a version complete with all of the 1945 Joyo kanji, but I don't know when that might be. I have put many painstaking hours into constructing the current database, and I do have a day job.
Kanji Hanabi is a flexible, "smart", flashcard-style quiz program for practicing recognition of Japanese kanji and kana. The database is also searchable, making Kanji Hanabi useful as a kanji reference as well.
When used as a practice tool, Kanji Hanabi shows you a picture of a kanji or kana character. You are given four choices from which you must select the correct meaning or reading for kanji, or the correct reading for kana. Kanji readings may be displayed in either romanji or kana, and you may switch freely between meaning, romanji readings, and kana readings before guessing.
You can choose animated rendering of the glyphs, to illustrate the correct stroke order. I suspect that just watching the kanji being drawn will have the subconscious effect of reinforcing your handwriting skills.
Your score is displayed, indicating how many glyphs you have been shown, and how many you have guessed correctly.
Other features include:
- The complete version includes
all of the Kyoiku Kanji (996 glyphs)
- Kanji browser for viewing
kanji and associated meanings/readings.
- Searchable database (by
meaning), for kanji reference.
- Kana readings table for
reference.
- User can select which
kanji/kana groups to practice.
- "Custom Deck" for practicing
a hand-selected group of kanji.
- User can select what types
of reading to practice.
- Adjustable delay for optional
visual indication of right/wrong.
- Optional confirmation
dialogs after each guess.
- Sound effects can be switched
on/off.
- Preferences and context
saved between sessions.
I hope to turn this section into something of a user manual, but for right now, I just want to explain how the smart quiz works.
Think of the kanji database (or the subset of the database you are practicing with) as a big deck of flash cards. To begin, you draw a "hand" of cards. You select a card out of your hand and try to guess it's meaning/reading. If you get it wrong, you put it back in your hand, and choose another one from your hand at random. If you get it right, you put it back in the deck and choose a new card for your hand. This is how Kanji Hanabi works.
My thinking is that this will keep you looking at a concentrated group of kanji at all times, so that you can't just miss one you don't know and forget about it (the likelihood it would come back up quickly is pretty slim when you're selecting randomly from a set of a few hundred kanji). There are a few additional features to make this even better.
Kanji Hanabi is smart about selecting the choices that are presented to you. The choices presented are selected so as to prevent any possible ambiguity, in other words, there should never be more than one answer that could possibly be correct. This may not hold true until the next kanji if you change to another display mode (e.g. from english to kana), and it's still possible to get an ambiguous set of choices when two meanings are very similar, but it's pretty good. Kanji Hanabi also attempts to present incorrect choices that are from your current "deck", although if it cannot find kanji that meet the distinctness rule, it will expand its search to include the whole database.
In the Kanji Browser, you will find a "Custom Deck" checkbox that can be set for each kanji in the database. The kanji that are checked make up your custom deck, which you can use to practice only the kanji you are interested in. This should be useful to students, who can add kanji according to their lesson plans.
The "Quiz Options..." menu item brings up a dialog with settings that control the behavior of the quiz. You can control how many cards you draw, to influence the "intensity" of the quiz. You can also control how many times you must guess correctly for each kanji before it is discarded. If you choose "3 times", for instance, and check the box labeled "Consecutive?", then you will have to get each kanji right three times in a row before it will be discarded.
Please let me know how you like this. I have found it to make Kanji Hanabi a very effective tool for expanding my kanji knowledge, and I have received many supportive comments, but I welcome any suggestions.
I plan to continue to enhance Kanji Hanabi. These are some of the larger enhancements I am considering, and which have been requested frequently by users. Thank you all for your feedback.
Version 1.8 - November 1, 1999
The C code, resource editing, and project management for Kanji Hanabi are done with CodeWarrior for Windows95/NT from Metrowerks. It's not perfect, but it's the only officially supported development environment I know of for PalmOS. Visit Metrowerks at:
Thanks to those who have purchased Kanji Hanabi- your support is very encouraging.
Thanks to all of the users out there who have sent me such positive feedback and great enhancement ideas! Kanji Hanabi is a better program as a result of your input.
The complete database exceeds 64K, so the complete version Kanji Hanabi will not work on Copilot.
I have had occasional reports of difficulty loading Kanji Hanabi from a Macintosh. If you have this problem, and discover information that may help, please let me know so that I can share it.
There may be a compatibility problem with MenuHack. I haven't had a chance to look in to this yet.
After many guesses (I noticed this after about 700), the Pilot sometimes gets sluggish and acts a bit weird. There must be some kind of memory leak. Paperclip your Pilot and everything will return to normal. I'm working on this one.
There has been an ongoing problem with Hanabi snow-crashing sometimes, especially in the Kanji Browser. The problem seems to have been more severe when batteries are low. Please let me know if you still see this problem, as I can't reproduce it any more.
I'm sure you'll find others, so let me know.
If any of the kanji are especially unrecognizable, or if any of the information (definitions or strokes) is incorrect, let me know so that I can clean them up in the next version.
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Use of Kanji Hanabi is entirely
at the user's risk; VENDOR assumes no liability for such use.
It is prudent to back up
your critical data before installing any new software.