FLASHKANJI V1.0 - Copyright (C) David Sitsky August 1997.

The flashkanji program is a free perl script which utilizes the edict
and kanjidic electronic databases maintained by Jim Breen, and the
lookup regular expression text searcher by Jeffrey Friedl to
automatically create html kanji "flashcards", which can be viewed by
any web-browser which supports Japanese text (Netscape and IE have
this capability, check their web-sites for more details).

The flashkanji program allows you to:

* Test a list of kanji specified in a file.
* Test a range of kanji using either Henshall indexes (or grades) or
  Frequency indexes.
* Automatically generates kanji compounds within a flashcard without
  any forward references in the specified kanji set.
* Allows the testing of kanji -> meanings/readings or visa-versa.
* Can limit the number of compounds to be displayed on a flashcard.
* Can randomize the order of presentation of the kanji set specified.
* Can randomize which kanji compounds are illustrated.
* Allows forward references in kanji compounds to occur within a kanji set.
* Allows kanji compounds to be composed with any other kanji.

The flexible ways in which kanji compounds may be created is
flashkanji's most powerful feature.  Even if you know a list of kanji
well, flashkanji will easily let you improve your vocabulary involving
these kanji within the context of compounds.  There is no limit to
which kanji you can be tested on.

To clarify these capabilities, the next part of this document will
illustrate various invocations of the flashkanji script.

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As a first example, flashcards of the 2nd grade characters from
Henshall's "A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters" can be
generated using the simple command:

flashkanji -henshall -range G2 -directory html -limit 5

The "-henshall" option indicates that Henshall indexing from kanjidic
are to be used.  The "-range G2" option indicates that the kanji set
to be used are the grade 2 kanji as specified by Henshall.  The
"-directory html" indicates that the resulting html files will be put
into the directory "html".  During this interval, various progress
messages are printed.  These messages can be disabled by using the
"-quiet" option.  The "-limit 5" option restricts the total number of
kanji compounds per flashcard to be 5.  Not using the limit option can
result in a large number of kanji compounds on each flashcard, thus
resulting in a large number of generated html files.

Once the program completes, a web browser should be directed onto the
html/kanji.html file, which is the start of a series of flashcards.
The interface and design of the cards has been kept deliberately
simple.

The compounds that are presented within a flashcard are composed of
kanji that have occurred either in previous flashcards or those kanji
which are ranked below the lowest kanji in the specified kanji set.
In the above example, this would include all kanji in grade one.  If
this behaviour is not desired, the "-strict" option ensures that only
those kanji which have occurred in previous flashcards will be used in
generating compounds.  The "-forward" option allows kanji compounds to
be composed of any kanji in the specified kanji set.  This is good for
practicing a given kanji set that you are already familiar with.  The
"-any" option is for those heros that are happy to allow _any_ kanji
to be used in generating compounds.

If the order of the flashcards is desired to be randomized (for better
practice), the -randomorder switch can be used.  The
"-randomcompounds" option randomly chooses compounds to be placed on
to the flashcard.  Compounds may include hiragana characters, if this
is not desired, the "-disallowhiragana" switch will ensure only "pure
kanji" compounds are used.

In addition to using Henshall indexing for specifying kanji ranges, it
is also possible to use the "frequency of use" index as recorded in
kanjidic.  If you wanted to be tested on the 100 most frequently used
kanji, with the kanji compounds being comprised of any of these 100
kanji, and limiting the flashcards to 5 compounds per flashcard, the
following command can be used:

flashkanji -frequency -range 1:100 -forward -limit 5 -directory html

Once these characters are mastered, the "-randomorder" and
"-randomcompounds" options can be used for real stress testing.

Another way of specifying a kanji set to flash over, is to explicitly
provide a file which contains a separate kanji per line and to use the
"-kanji <filename>" option.  All the other options above can then be
applied to this kanji set, for example, if the file "kanji.tbl"
contained a list of kanji that you wished to be flashed to you, the
following command could be used:

flashkanji -kanji kanji.tbl -directory html -forward -limit 5 -randomorder \
           -strict

Finally, at this stage, all flashes have been from kanji -> meanings/readings.
It is possible to be tested in the reverse direction by using the 
"-reversetest" switch.
 
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More up-to-date information can be obtained from the flashkanji home
page at http://cap.anu.edu.au/~sits/flashkanji.  If you have any
comments or suggestions, please don't hesitate to email me at
sits@cafe.anu.edu.au.

I hope this program helps in your kanji comprehension.  Ganbatte!

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INSTALLATION

To use this program, at this stage, it is necessary to be running in a
UNIX environment as to my knowledge there are no releases of the
lookup package on other platforms.  If you are interested in seeing
this program on other platforms, please let me know.  Firstly the
edict and kanjidic dictionaries need to be obtained from one of the
nihongo archive sites nearest you:

ftp://ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/	     Australia
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/japanese/monash/     US - California
ftp://kuso.shef.ac.uk/pub/japanese/monash/   UK
ftp://enterprise.ic.gc.ca/pub/nihongo/       Canada
ftp://ftp.sedl.org/pub/mirrors/nihongo/      US(Texas)
ftp://ftp.uwtc.washington.edu/pub/Japanese/Monash/ US(Washington)
ftp://ftp.xmission.com/pub/users/s/snowhare/nihongo/monash/ US(Utah)
ftp://ftp.u-aizu.ac.jp/pub/SciEng/nihongo/ftp.cc.monash.edu.au/ Japan
ftp://ftp.funet.fi/pub/culture/japan/mirrors/monash/ Finland
ftp://ftp.uni-duisburg.de/pub/mirror/nihongo/monash/ Germany

The lookup and jconv programs are also required and can be retrieved
from the same archive.  The lookup program should be built and run so
that the appropriate index files for the edict and kanjidic dictionaries
are created using the -write parameter.  See the lookup documentation
for more details.

The very top of the flashkanji script has a number of variables which
record where these programs and files are stored.  These need to be
modified for your local configuration.  The path to your perl
interpreter also needs to be set.  Perl versions 4 and 5 have been
used successfully with this script with lookup version 1.01.

I have found for best results, the proportional font size in Netscape
should be set to 18.0 (options -> general preferences -> fonts).
Hopefully there is a similar setting in IE.

--
Cheers,
;) David

