Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006
Using the Palm to study Japanese
This article is a contribution kindly Carlos Madrazo, for the Tungsten PDA. I simply translated from English, the original is in his blog. Thanks Carlos.
Learning a new language requires time (patience), practice self-discipline and above all motivation. In the practice, technology can help us make our study more practical to use some programs on our Palm. For all other respects, the Palm can not help us. In other words, these programs have not installed any good if we do not use them.
For the Japanese, there are some tools that make it worth investing in a Palm. These actually use:
- PAdict: a free software that combines the efforts of many people, a union of several programs. Makes it possible to write a kanji, hiragana and katakana, and search for words and compounds (using the free dictionary Edict). Very well done. It also includes Pocketkanji, which shows how to write the kanji, its meaning and sound (Onyomi and kunyomi.) You can search for a kanji by radical (handy if you do not know how to spell). Search in English. A must.
- SuperMemo: This software can be used to learn anything, not just Japanese. I find it very useful. Each day generates a separate examination, and you rate. Depending on what you know, prepares the examination the next day, so I always know what we have to study and not waste time studying what we already know. There are a few free databases such as the 2000 kanji by Todd Rudick (rikai.com), but we can do ours, either directly, or notepad, word, excel, etc.. Repomendable for all students with a Palm
- J-OS: Palm makes the Japanese characters can be represented (in language reading and writing romance, romaji, to write in kana or kanji, need PAdict). This program is not necessary to use PAdict, but for some dictionaries SuperMemo and I will discuss below. The drawback is that it costs $ 40 (which in Japan is not as expensive, but anyway, I think it is overpriced). Anyway, it is essential to use the database to SuperMemo 2000 kanji, and to read documents in Japanese. I recently found an alternative, Japan, but have not tried it yet.
- WDIC: A program to read dictionaries written in PDict format (. Dec), a format developed in Japan for electronic dictionaries do not know if it has been used elsewhere in the world. There are some dictionaries to pay, and free DOWNLOAD optros of which can be used on the PC, but with this program can also read on your Palm. The English <-> Japanese definitive, and free, it Eijiro, you can use free on their website, but payment is the version that we use on the Palm, worth 1980 yen, and can be purchased here. It occupies 214Mb, so you need a memory card. We may also use the Edict dictionary (the same PAdict) for English-> Japanese and Japanese counterpart to Waeiji-> English, Peter Rivard explains this. I have not bought the Eijiro, but such phrases are good fats, I'll buy in the future.
- So why not to use Wdict and PAdict? also installing WdictDA and DALauncher (same author as J-OS but free), we can look up words in Japanese from any other application. Very useful when we are studying the database of 2000 kanji in SuperMemo. If you do not know how it is pronounced (most of the time), you should check at a time, without leaving the application (using a popup window). Peter Rivard also explains this. Another reason is that there are two other small dictionaries Spanish-> Japanese: this and this.
- Learn Alphabets: very useful for practice and test your knowledge of kanji (Todd Rudick (rikai.com) has databases for this). It is also very good for beginners who are studying Hiragana and Katakana.
- EReader: PDFs are very useful on the web. This for example. This reader is much better than Adobe. There are others but are not free. For example, I tried to DocumentsToGo and hung to open a PDF. But I open PDFs with PalmPDF over 600 pages and there was no problem (opening soon, but less than a minute).
- Pocket Tunes (or any other MP3 player): often the language study books come with a CD and listen better to our understanding. Pocket Tunes is good because we can do other tasks while listening to MP3.
- King Kanji: other software is very useful but have not tried it yet. It is to pay, and with other software, I've never needed.
PocketKanji is a powerful tool
As a DA, you can run it from any application
Note: in Japan is difficult to get a Palm, so if the need is better traérnosla already here.
Thank you very much to:
- PAdict developers.
- Todd David Rudick for Rikaichan plugin for Firefox, and "2000 kanji database".
- Peter Rivard on their files for Wdict Edict, and his explanation of how to install Eijiro (and edict) on the Palm.
- Jim Breen for initiating the Edict Project, which is also the basis of PAdict.
- Mark Gonzalez Troyes, his blog inspired me to write this.
Kindly Carlos and other readers are being added, in comments, more interesting programs to the list. Do not forget to take a look.
By: Carlos Madrazo in Palm Tips
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Post that most interesting piece of .... (Especially for those who, as a server, intend to stop by a neighborhood that many conoceis ....,-D).
Not long ago, I looked for similar software for my PPC, with whom I share, along with my TC, the pile that fiddling all day ...
I'll try this software for Palm, since I've encontardo PPC has not convinced me nothing nothing nothing.
Thanks for posting and obviously the author, Carlos.
Arigato.
excellent post some time ago I was researching something, but always looking SW in Spanish. Thanks
hola que tal, in fact the information that I found on the network, it only added to the PDF and MP3. The first paragraph is partly a message to myself that in order to learn this, you might take time every day. At the moment I left the basic level, I was late by several years now but I have not been consistent (I've seen people just this level in less than a year) and I hope this software helps daily review it easy to reach faster to advanced.
If just beginning, Learn Alphabets PAdict and I think they are more than sufficient. At the moment I am dedicating to learn to read kanji, I use the data base of 2000 kanji I mention for SuperMemo and also writes words or sentences that then try to read. I wrote it certainly can make databases with Word and Excel but I was struggling so I opted for them directly in the palm. (requires the J-os for Japanese character salt, which incidentally, are introduced by putting Keyboard and typing in romaji, if you want to insert in hiragana or kanji, have to use PADict, go to the section R (romaji) after writing and use copy-paste, which is anything but practical).
if someone uses kingkanji please let me know your opinion. greetings
so far, super memo muchisimo has served me, my learner's speed improves.
another alternative I've found software and is not paid is twingle: http://twinkle.sourceforge.net/
You seem to not need the J-OS because it uses the PAdict fonts.
to study the characters I've done the book "Remembering the kanji" in Spanish is called "kanji to remember" and there is software specifically for this book called KanjiGym:
http://www.nipoweb.com/trabajos/libros/kanjigym.htm
http://www.kanjigym.de/
pondre and the review of them applied despuespues
Using Palm to study Japanese ...
Hello your article that seemed more interesting, and I hurry to try to put it into practice, but try to stay in because the J-OS was not able to install and configure it properly, things just in a super-crash ...
Abusing their knowledge poisible may indicate where to find information (not being in Japanese) on this patch.
By the way I try to install on a Treo 650 and also in an old Tungsten T
Gracias mil
Beriha
La Floresta
for J-OS specific versions exist for each model.
I found another software that can be used to translate Japanese, but I still think PADict best option, since it's free
http://www.tranexp.com/win/PalmTran-japanese-english-examples.htm