Happy Geek Sat. Oct 21st, 06
I’m a really happy geek right now! Check it out. I wanted a flash card program for my computer that I could customize with sets that match what I’m learning. For example, the text we are using to learn kanji is the Basic Kanji Book, and the main text is Genki. I am expected to know the kanji taught in BKB and the vocab from Genki. There are a number of flash card programs out there, but as you can imagine none that teach exactly what I need to learn. So I was looking over Jim Breen’s list of software and saw that he had written a flash card program. Now, if you study Japanese you will probably have been to Jim Breen’s site, if you use Linux and study Japanese you surely will have visited his site, for Jim Breen is a Linux geek all the way. Looking at the documentation for the program, called “jbdrill” I happily noted that you could create your own files. I also noted that the program was multi-platform, so Microsoft Slaves and Mac fans can use it as well.
Installing the program was simple enough, and I immediately added a launcher to the Gnome panel. I don’t know if it is as easy in Windows or OS X, since it requires a couple scripting languages which probably aren’t preloaded. Creating a vocab file was not so easy. I needed to create a file, each line of which would be a “card” in the format kanji; kana; english1; english2, etc, with the file extension being .vcb. I did this, but the program wouldn’t read it. I then noticed that the program required that the character encoding used be EUC-JP. I don’t know much about character encoding. I looked all over OpenOffice but couldn’t figure out how to do this. I googled it and eventually found out how. When you save the file, you save it as “Text Encoded”. It gives you a warning about losing formatting and when you click through that you get to choose what encoding you want to use. EUC-JP was there so I picked it. Unfortunately that didn’t work. I messed around for a bit and then created a new file, saving it in the manner I described. With fingers crossed, I attempted to open it. And it worked.
If you don’t want to create your own sets you can just take chunks from the EDICT dictionary file. EDICT is a Japanese dictionary file used by many programs. Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC is a web-based interface for this file.
Hopefully some of my class-mates will want to help with this. All they need to do to help is type in vocab words and save it in a certain manner. Then we can share files/drill sets.
