Japanese
Fullscreen flashcard program
Mar 17th
I’ve put together the first version of a simple program for displaying flashcards in fullscreen, mainly as an exercise in WPF but also because its damn useful for all sorts of teaching environments. Flash cards are simple text files that anyone can edit – just load them up and hit spacebar to cycle through them. “Big Flash Cards” is now at version 0.1 
It supports Unicode so is perfect for Japanese lessons, for which I designed it. Example flash card files are included – they are very easy to edit and are simple text files. This is a very early version so there will be bugs.
Download Big Flash Cards (117kb zip)
Vista and Windows 7 users: just unzip and run BigFlashCards.exe
Windows XP users: You need at least version 3.0 of the .NET Framework. Download it here.
For those that care, this was developed in Visual Studio C# 2008 solely on a tiny little Dell Mini9 laptop.
Mail.app and iPhone encode Japanese as Korean
Jul 27th
The latest of ridiculous bugs I have found after my switchover to Mac is that Korean takes precedence over Japanese when “Automatic” is selected as the encoding on Mail.app. It literally sees Japanese text as Korean and encodes emails as ISO-2022-KR (Korean) if both Japanese and Korean are selected under Languages.
Try it yourself: make sure both Korean and Japanese are in the Languages list (so they show both show up in Mail.app’s Message > Text Encoding) and send an email containing Japanese text when encoding is set to “Automatic”. View the full message source and see that it encodes the message as ISO-2022-KR, not ShiftJIS or UTF-8 which it should. You have to completely remove Korean from the list if you want to use Automatic encoding, or manually select the encoding yourself every time. I cannot find a setting to force an encoding (er, UTF-8) on every email you send.
This is not a problem if the recipient is a PC/Mac user since the mail client will sort it out – but sending mails to a Japanese phone, which obviously has no idea what to do with Korean text encoding (and can’t suss out that its actually Japanese text) means that the lucky recipient gets 文字化け、mojibake, jumbled garbage.
Its even worse on the iPhone
If you ever decide to turn Korean keyboards on in the Language settings, or switch to Korean, iPhone appears to add Korean to the Languages list when choosing its own encoding. However, you cannot change the encoding manually on iPhone, or ever remove Korean from the list, even if you then disable Korean input.
The net result? You can never send Japanese mails to Japanese mobile phones ever again on your iPhone, until you do a full system restore. Which I am now doing. If you reply to a mail that was sent to you in ShiftJIS, the iPhone is at least clever enough to reply in the same encoding type but you are SOL if you want to compose a new one.
Rubbish. Windows Mobile has an option to “always send mail as UTF-8″. I wonder how many iPhone users in Japan have fallen foul of this?
Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds
Apr 7th
I’ve finally had the pleasure of getting a copy of Garr Reynolds’ Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. Garr Reynolds, for those of you that don’t know him, is the world’s Powerpoint guru and his Presentation Zen blog is essential reading for anybody in the business of delivering presentations or public speaking.
The book is very visual, giving hundreds of examples of both good and bad Powerpoint design. Garr is of the “less is more” school of thought and he shows you how to turn horrific clip-art bullet point laden disasters into slick, to the point and punchy presentations that would make Steve Jobs proud.
Garr also touches on some aspects of Zen (of which he is very fond) and how it applies to the delivery and preparation of presentations. Be prepared for a bit of a Japanese lesson when reading about some of the concepts.
He is sympathetic with the current nightmare of slideshows shown in almost every lecture theatre and boardroom in the country, blaming slideware (Powerpoint, Keynote) for “guiding users toward presenting in outline form with subject titles and bullet points grouped under each topic heading” – basically the usual bullet point snoozes we have to endure every day. I really wish that this was compulsory reading for University lecturers.
Look at this slide from a lecture I was in today – I actually could not read the text from my seat in the room:
By quickly redesigning the slide based on the principles of Presentation Zen (in Powerpoint 2007), I get the following slide:
You might be wondering where all the information has gone – it is however the presenter’s job to present the information by speaking and explaining each point clearly and concisely, not reading from a slide. Streams of text copy and pasted from the net need to be in a seperate handout. The “watermarking” at the bottom of the slide is equally useless.
Teachers, please buy this book and start delivering engaging presentations that encourage students to come to the lecture. 5 people came to the class today – it started with 50. Engaging presentations will also teach the kids more!
PocketStackz (PocketPC) review
Apr 10th
For Japanese language practice for my course I use PocketStackz by some chaps called “Minddate software”. Its an all-purpose language flashcard program with an emphasis on Asian languages (such as that an Asian Unicode font needs to be installed on your PocketPC).
What sets it apart is that you can immediately see what words you need to study at any point since the program sorts the words into “stacks” from “unknown” on the left to “known” on the right. If you get an answer wrong when testing yourself, the word moves towards the left, and visa versa if you get one right. This means when you have only a few hours until a vocab exam, you can quickly refresh the “most unknown” vocab in the quiz.
Vocab or kanji can be tested in pretty much any combination (romaji to kana, kana to kanji etc) and I find I get better results if I use it for short periods of time often. My test results even confirm this – weeks where I’ve spent 5 minutes a day with PocketStackz have seen perfect vocabulary test scores. You still need a drive to study, when when you don’t need to get your textbooks and pen and paper out (or those silly little “word cards”) its easier to find the time.
The software comes with a free PC application so you can make your own lists of vocabulary, but files for many textbooks and series of kanji (including the official joyo kanji) are available on the developers website. I had to make the kanji files for the Genki textbook series since they were not available, but this was painless using the PC software. Top stuff. 5/5.
Plus its only 19$ from Handango and they have a free trial (which I liked so much I bought it). Thats £8!
Buy or trial PocketStackz from Handango
Genki Japanese Textbook Vocab file for PocketStacks
Genki Japanese Textbook Kanji file for PocketStackz
Japanese keitai flashcards
Apr 2nd
Access Edo no Tango on your Japanese keitai/mobile phone at http://www.edandersen.com/tango or scan the QR code on the right:
Edo no Tango (Ed’s Tango, エドの単語) is a Flash Lite based Japanese language vocabulary and kanji flashcard utility. Developed to help my study, it currently contains lessons 10 through 17 from the Genki series of Japanese language textbooks
It uses Flash Lite 1.1 so runs on the vast majority of Japanese contract phones (the pre-paid ones can’t quite manage it). Give it a try! Press the 1 key when in the flashcards to display the button commands.
Postmortem
Flash Lite 1.1 is extremely basic – it only has the features of Flash 4. Flash Lite 2 is much better, supporting a Flash 7-esque feature set but at the time of creating the program was not on any Japanese phones yet – the closest you could get was a downloadable plugin for Nokia devices. There are several limitations of Flash Lite 1.1 which made development challenging:
- No Unicode support. This was the first major hurdle. Even on Japanese devices, it is impossible to display Japanese text using the device font. Flash Lite 2 fixes this, but in the mean time Japanese text needs to be encoded as vectors or images.
- 100kb network limit. It makes sense, but all the Japanese networks limit the size of any one file you download to around 99kb. This means with no Unicode, images or vectors for each kanji character soon add up.
- Dynamic network retrieval of data is limited to rudimentary text files with no XML support. No Unicode means retreiving data was impossible anyway, but this meant I had to create a seperate file for each set of flashcards, needlessly increasing data use and not making a very elegant solution.
- The phones have very limited memory, so my original idea of using 2bit images for each flashcard resulted in graphical corruption every time. Images would just turn red after showing four or five of them. In the end, 2bit images were converted into vectors using the “break apart” command.
I don’t need to use this now (I bought an off the shelf Pocket PC application to do the job) so I haven’t got round to adding new lessons. Its not simply a case of putting new data on a server unlike a Flash Lite 2 based version would be capable of.