Lemma Soft Forums

So, it's been a long term project, with several complete overhauls, but I'm basically finished with a Java program that I've been developing. Originally, it was meant to help people memorize only Hiragana and Katakana. Ambition set in, however, and I managed to add support for vocabulary and even Kanji (though, these features are limited by the user's access to a Japanese dictionary, hopefully electronic).

Another feature I added, just for the fun of it (and because "Anime makes you happy!") was a cute little anime character that gives minimal feedback to the user. For added fun, this anime character can be set to speak English or Japanese. Which brings me to the reason for this post.

Does anyone here fluently speak Japanese? I need some translations, and I'd really rather not try to translate it myself. It's only a few lines- not a large job by any means.

Additionally, I'd be interested to know who here is learning, or interested in learning Japanese characters. I'd like to get some in-depth honest feed back about my program.

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http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jasons/summersnow

I'd LOVE to learn Japanese...there's a lot of Japanese around here, and it would be a good idea to be able to talk to them in THEIR native tongue...they have no problems talking in English, but I think it would be a good idea to learn Japanese, just the same...call it a desire to learn a new language <and I would rather learn Japanese than Spanish>

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A friend is one that walks in when the world walks out.

I took four years of Spanish in Jr. High and High School. I don't do a thing with it now. Japanese wasn't even available at my school, but a friend of mine took it at his high school- I was so jealous.
I'm somewhat at a crossroads for learning Japanese myself right now... I'm registered for my first actual class this Fall, but I"m contemplating dropping it. I'm just doubting whether or not I'll ever actually become fluent...

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http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jasons/summersnow

I took three years in college, and I can do simple translations okay... If there's no one better you can find for the task, I can give it a shot

I'm really interested in your program (because anime will make you happy yea!!! )

I know hiragana, katakana and a few select kanji such as kara, hito, ame etc. but nothing close to actually reading japanese.

I've been using an offline dictionary program, a kana "flash" flashcard and "knuckles in china land."

_________________
How do you make your games? I see. Thank you for the prompt replies, but it is my considered opinion that you're doing it wrong inefficiently because I am a perfushenal professional. Do it my way this way and we can all ascend VN Nirvana together while allowing me to stroke my ego you will improve much faster. Also, please don't forget to thank me for this constructive critique or I will cry and bore you to death respond appropriately with a tl;dr rant discourse of epic adequately lengthy proportions. - Sarcasm Veiled in Euphemism: Secrets of Forum Civility by lordcloudx (Coming soon to an online ebook near you.)

I've learnt it on my own... slowly getting the grasp of each alphabet. I'm stuck at kanjis now and have no real notion of grammar ^^;. I feed off premade-sentences from animes mostly :p. Fortunately, I know enough to get a vague grasp of a text-only *simple* story, but lazyness to translate *every* unknown kanji doesn't help >.>.

Meet Hanako.
Just watch out- if you get the wrong answer too many times, you just might be insulted by a fifth grader.

I forgot to mention, art and translations are about the only think I have left to do. The art is being done by none other than the amazingly talented snowshine. I'm waiting for only a few more images.
I'm finished with the website- http://www.cs.utah.edu/~jasons/jflash/index.html
The program download link won't work, as I haven't uploaded the program yet, but everything else should give you a pretty good idea about how the program works.


I'm excited to here that you're interested, but I think you may find my program disappointing. It doesn't really teach how to speak or read Japanese. It's focus is primarily the memorization of Kana and, for advanced users, kanji and vocabulary. It wasn't meant to be a one stop resource, but a tool to complement other resources. I've struggled with the idea of having the program teach the very basics of Japanese characters as well as more complicated things such as character strokes and grammar. Those things are definitely beyond the scope I had originally intended for this project. But then again, so were the vocabulary and kanji features- and even a superfluous color function.
However, I have wanted to add grammar functionality for quite some time, so it is quite possible I will add that feature in at some point. I just haven't come up with a good program design- and I worry a little about copyright issues from the text book I would use. If J-Flash is well received, I'll invest more time in developing a good program design, and find some way around the copyright issues. But, if no one is going to use the program, then my time would be better spent just studying from my text book. I developed J-Flash so I could use it myself- I thought it would make learning faster. Yeah right... This program has taught me more about Java programming than about Japanese. But, now that it's this far along, maybe it'll start paying off for me as well.

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http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jasons/summersnow

oooh... hanako is a loli.

I wouldn't be disappointed at all if it didn't teach me about grammar (don't complain bout free ice cream thingy hehe) I've been looking for a good program where I can learn a kanji or two a day for a long time. I'm currently using kanji gold but something with an anime gui would probably suit me better.

I've been disappointed with the summer japanese courses offered in the local universities where I'm from. They only teach spoken japanese and I've pretty much grasped most of the common words and phrases (which is just about what they teach)

_________________
How do you make your games? I see. Thank you for the prompt replies, but it is my considered opinion that you're doing it wrong inefficiently because I am a perfushenal professional. Do it my way this way and we can all ascend VN Nirvana together while allowing me to stroke my ego you will improve much faster. Also, please don't forget to thank me for this constructive critique or I will cry and bore you to death respond appropriately with a tl;dr rant discourse of epic adequately lengthy proportions. - Sarcasm Veiled in Euphemism: Secrets of Forum Civility by lordcloudx (Coming soon to an online ebook near you.)

Oh, how cute! I love the mascot!

I've been reading a Japanese/English dictionary as reading material (what?) and have been trying to lot some Japanese. I probably only know about 35-50 characters, but I'm very proud of knowing them. It took a lot of practice.

Ask me to write them down, and I'd be at a complete loss though for anything more complex than "mouth" or "earth" or "child". I'm hoping that with recognition and familiarity comes the ability to duplicate the symbol accurately.

So, I would love a program like this. I have to grab a dictionary every time katakana comes up, and I'd feel better if I genuinely knew them.

You make it sound dirty...

and that doesn't sound quite right either ^_^;;;

I need to change that... Any ideas? I seem to recall that there is a Japanese word that means "Young school girl in a school uniform" or something like that. (Yes. That's one word. I know what you're thinking. Don't ask.) Maybe I could use that word instead. Does anyone know that word?
EDIT: I found the word I was thinking of. It's "joshikousei", and unfortunately refers to high school students. It pretty much means "a cute high school girl in a sailor uniform". One word. Amazing. Hey, maybe I should include this word in the vocabulary of my program! LOL

Anyway, the idea was that the material the program teaches is taught in elementary schools in Japan, so why not use an elementary student anime character? And then, why not make it really cute? And wahlah~ Hanako was the perfect choice! Why? Because nothing is cuter than a Japanese elementary anime school girl with pig tails? It's like, an unwritten law of the universe. Anyone who has seen Chiyo-chan attempt the "busu gasu baku haku" tongue twister, or sing "Tsukurimashou" will instantly understand what I'm talking about. And just for the record, Hanako is not based off Chiyo-chan. In fact, her preliminary sketch was drawn long before I heard the words "Azumanga Daioh". Which brings me to another point...

I'm glad you think so, but I'm not entirely sure "mascot" is correct. Hanako wasn't as much designed for J-Flash, as much as she was just the right choice. So, I feel almost as if this is more of a cameo- even though it will be her first official appearance.

_________________
http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jasons/summersnow

Hee!



word word... jogakusei? josei? loli? (actually I have a romanji-english and vice-versa dictionary program too.)

_________________
How do you make your games? I see. Thank you for the prompt replies, but it is my considered opinion that you're doing it wrong inefficiently because I am a perfushenal professional. Do it my way this way and we can all ascend VN Nirvana together while allowing me to stroke my ego you will improve much faster. Also, please don't forget to thank me for this constructive critique or I will cry and bore you to death respond appropriately with a tl;dr rant discourse of epic adequately lengthy proportions. - Sarcasm Veiled in Euphemism: Secrets of Forum Civility by lordcloudx (Coming soon to an online ebook near you.)

hmm... quite close to what I was thinking of... Does "jogakusei" refer specifically to elementary student? Maybe I should use that word... Or maybe not- I was hoping the term would be more familiar than that. As it stands, it won't help people new to Japanese understand what I mean.


Well, my program doesn't have a built in dictionary- kanji or otherwise. It requires the user to compile a list of Kanji they would like to learn into text files that it can then use. For most people, this probably means resorting to an online dictionary to find the words they'd like to practice. But for you, it sounds like Kanji Gold would be a perfect resource to finding the Kanji you'd like to study.
The thing is though, I'm not positive how useful my program is for learning Kanji. I know next to nothing about Kanji, and Kanji support was just sort of tacked on, when I realized one day, "Hey- I wonder if this would work". Very old versions of the program depended on image files to represent the kana- and having images of all 9,000+ Kanji was impossible. When I finally successfully switched to using fonts, I didn't immediately realize all of the beneficial implications concerning Kanji.
So, yeah... when I realized I could add support for it easily, I did- but there's nothing special about it. I guess I just think there has to be some sort of efficient way to learn about Kanji. And whatever that way is, my program doesn't take advantage of it. But, if you just want to pick out a few random Kanji, and try to memorize them, then J-Flash should work perfectly for you.
About the anime GUI, it's nice and cute- but it's also simple and repetetive.
I don't know why I'm downplaying it so much. Perhaps because I'm not professional at programming, yet. I'm still a student. I just hope it meets your expectations.

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http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jasons/summersnow

accdg. to the dictionary I'm using. Josei and Jogakusei both mean schoolgirl while gakusei alone means student.
Also, shougakusei means grade school student

sei, guess it's a shortcut for seito?

Anyway, don't sell yourself too short. After all, it's your project.

A freeware rpg called "knuckles in china land" also helps memorize kanji and kana (and according to the instructions, any other language with a little tweaking) through a flashcard rpg battle system, but I'd like a program that sits quietly in the background when I don't feel like using it and not a fullscreen app.

And Kanji Gold is freeware. I got it through a random google search. It quizes you by grade level based on the japanese system of teaching.

_________________
How do you make your games? I see. Thank you for the prompt replies, but it is my considered opinion that you're doing it wrong inefficiently because I am a perfushenal professional. Do it my way this way and we can all ascend VN Nirvana together while allowing me to stroke my ego you will improve much faster. Also, please don't forget to thank me for this constructive critique or I will cry and bore you to death respond appropriately with a tl;dr rant discourse of epic adequately lengthy proportions. - Sarcasm Veiled in Euphemism: Secrets of Forum Civility by lordcloudx (Coming soon to an online ebook near you.)

Oh, I did a search at download.com and only one program came up- a dictionary program- so I thought that was it. Just did a google search, and I think I found the program you were talking about. For learning Kanji, it looks a lot more useful than my program. But it's not as flashy ^_^ . And I don't see any strict Hiragana or Katakana features- which was the original design for J-Flash.


Interesting. Did they actually get rights to use knuckes in the game?
The search for that game led me to another game- http://lrnj.com/slimeforest.html . Looks interesting.
Do games like this help a lot, or do they have a lot of fluff?
Anyone remember number munchers, from back in the day? I pwned that game- the only thing that kept me from reaching level infinity was some stupid bug that would cause it to crash randomly >_< . Anyway, I've been playing with the idea of a "kana munchers". I've even typed up a bit of code already. Do you think people would be interested in a game like that? It's not as fun as an RPG, but it would also have a lot less fluff, I'm sure.

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http://www.eng.utah.edu/~jasons/summersnow

slime forest vs kicl. I've seen some pretty heated arguments about the two games.

Knuckles in China Land is indeed technically superior to Slime Forest but I don't like how people are bashing slime forest though.

Here is some info about the game (maybe they ran into some copyright issues. I don't see the download link anymore)
http://www.tbns.net/knuckles/

I don't think they're actually permitted to use Knuckles (and other sonic characters) in the game.

I'm not familiar with number crunchers so I can't say anything about that.

_________________
How do you make your games? I see. Thank you for the prompt replies, but it is my considered opinion that you're doing it wrong inefficiently because I am a perfushenal professional. Do it my way this way and we can all ascend VN Nirvana together while allowing me to stroke my ego you will improve much faster. Also, please don't forget to thank me for this constructive critique or I will cry and bore you to death respond appropriately with a tl;dr rant discourse of epic adequately lengthy proportions. - Sarcasm Veiled in Euphemism: Secrets of Forum Civility by lordcloudx (Coming soon to an online ebook near you.)