Brilliant Idea. Free to a good home.
Sep. 30th, 2005 03:27 pmFour free software projects that are publicly available merged in my brain to become something bigger than their original parts. The projects are: qcomicbook (A Qt program allows you to read digitized comics and manga), gjiten (A GTK program that accepts keyboard input for kana/kanji), kanjipad (An X-11 program that accepts input from an artpad and spits out the possible kanji), and moji (A XUL program that accepts one, two, or three kanji and produces the translated word or phrase in English.)
A popular (and effective, for me at least) way of learning Japanese is to read manga in the original. But the dictionary lookup process is marred by a lack of speed: it takes a while to go from SKIP code to SKIP code, and that's not useful learning time.
So why not make that part of the process automatic? I envision a two-pane system. On the left, the page you're reading, with some zoom, forward/backward, and panning features. On the right, a stroke box on top hooked up to an art pad. A strip on the right or the bottom contains the "likely kanji" for the strokes you've just entered. Below that, an "accumulator" box that's picking up the kanji you've chosen and systematically providing you with individual and aggregate translations of those characaters.
Over time, this process (known as scanlation) will become more and more automatic as the characters and sequences become familiar.
This is one of those "in my copious spare time" projects. All the tools are available. As I am an Elf of very little brain or time, I'm not gonna get to it anytime soon. Someone else should take a crack at it.
A popular (and effective, for me at least) way of learning Japanese is to read manga in the original. But the dictionary lookup process is marred by a lack of speed: it takes a while to go from SKIP code to SKIP code, and that's not useful learning time.
So why not make that part of the process automatic? I envision a two-pane system. On the left, the page you're reading, with some zoom, forward/backward, and panning features. On the right, a stroke box on top hooked up to an art pad. A strip on the right or the bottom contains the "likely kanji" for the strokes you've just entered. Below that, an "accumulator" box that's picking up the kanji you've chosen and systematically providing you with individual and aggregate translations of those characaters.
Over time, this process (known as scanlation) will become more and more automatic as the characters and sequences become familiar.
This is one of those "in my copious spare time" projects. All the tools are available. As I am an Elf of very little brain or time, I'm not gonna get to it anytime soon. Someone else should take a crack at it.
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