Singularity on the Plane

The first printout of my first 1500 (or so) words is optimized to memorize the English meaning of a Japanese word. This is because the format is:

KANJI     KANA     ENGLISH_1, ENGLISH_2, ...

So, to drill the words, I cover the English meaning (and kana, if kanji exists) with a paper and then try to answer it.

For drilling the reverse, the ideal format is:

ENGLISH     KANJI_1 (KANA_1), KANJI_2 (KANA_2), ...

This time, it’s the kanji and kana that’s covered and I must translate from English to Japanese.

Of course, we can use the first format to drill English->Japanese by covering the kanji and kana. However there are two shortcomings:

• The entries are sorted by kanji/kana. Therefore the sound of the answers will be similar if we drill from the top to bottom. This provides an unwanted clue.
• Entries with the same English (for example 本日 and 今日 for “today”) is separated. Therefore there is ambiguity when trying to answer some items.

Thus the need for another format.

Preparing the first one isn’t hard because that’s exactly the format I use in my ods file. To prepare the second format, I write a filter for my text transformation program, LineFilter. The result is here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 2:04 pm by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under Hardware & Software, Japanese, Study, Works. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.