RyuKent on Life

I’m currently loving the new Google Chrome extensions. Today I’d particularly like to plug Furigana Injector. This great little plugin adds furigana to kanji on websites.

It can be downloaded within Chrome at this address. With an increasing number of top quality extensions now available, the battle between Firefox is going to get interesting. With Chrome’s superior speed and seemingly faster development we will see people switching left right and centre.

I’ve been doing some experiments trying to use Japanese characters in Adobe Air applications. There doesn’t seem to be much written on this subject so far. I’ve discovered that it is possible to input in Japanese in both Windows and Linux (using SCIM), but that it is program specific and depends on the fonts that have been selected in the application. Unlike Java which has a system of switching to a different font when a character is not found in the default set, Air will not continue if it cannot render the character in the selected font.

Some applications seem to have implemented a work around by having an international font that can be selected in the settings. TweetDeck is a great example of this. You can turn on the international font and then SCIM works fine. See below:

So basically, at the moment, until Adobe improve the Air system, it looks like the suggested way of getting east Asian characters to work in Adobe Air is to contact the developer and ask them to implement an international font. I imaging the prospect of their software also working in China, Japan and Korea would probably be enough for most to do this.

On Learning

One thing that I first want to point out is that the most effective way of learning new vocabulary is not from a list at all, but from putting yourself in real life situations where the word comes into context and has a distinct situational meaning to you. This will allow it to stick in your mind and also provide examples of its usage so that you know how to string it into a sentence.

But

However, we are not all lucky enough to be surrounded by such a real life environment and also this system takes a considerable amount of time. Most language students are required to learn large lists of vocab, especially for tests. Subsequently, a different method must be applied (though ideally in parallel to the above).

Most effective way?

So based on the fact that a list must be learned, we then come to the question, what is the most effective way. First look at the goal. How will this list need to reproduced from memory. If the answer is sequentially in order, then go away and read the list 100 times. Usually though, we will need to be able to translate the word in one or both directions on the fly. To achieve this, we will need to create hooks in our mind that bind the two (or 3 in case of Kanji and pronunciation) words together. This can be done by simple looking at them continuously, but normally the greatest problem to overcome is knowing what needs to be learned and concentrating on the the ones that we are least comfortable. To efficiently manage our time, we should target learning specifically to what we need to learn. A Computer Program Can Help!

This is where a computer program such as Tango Blaster can REALLY HELP. I spent hours with paper lists and yes I did manage to learn a lot, but I ended up wasting valuable time reading down words on the list that I already knew and this caused me to get bored and skip ones I didn’t. Also, after a while I began learning the order which was really dangerous as taken out of this order, I found it much harder to produce the answers.

The solution

The solution is to have a program that can dynamically create lists, filter out what you know, leaving a core list of subject to be studied and then to be able to shuffle the data in order to test your ‘on the spot’ knowledge. Also, the other benefit is that it allows you to quickly select which part of the the data you want to be prompted with and which part to reproduce. I have found through bitter experience that simple knowing a word from Japanese > English, does not mean you can then reproduce it back the other way in a real life situation. it is VERY important to learn words both ways round in order to be able to use them.

These fonts are very useful for viewing Japanese text. They were designed by Ricoh and are owned by Microsoft. Although they are freely available on the internet, they are not freeware. They are governed by Microsoft licenses, but you are able to download and use them for free. The files come from www.themeworld.com.

MS Gothic

This is a sans serif font. It has both nice looking Western and Japanese faces.
MS Gothic

MS Mincho

This is a serif font. It too has both nice looking Western and Japanese faces.
MS Mincho