Japanese Flashcards ------------------- The story --------- Japanese Flashcards is a program written in response to an idle comment from a friend: 'I want a computer program that does flashcards for katakana'. I downloaded the source code to a few Japanese programs that run under English Windows 95/98 (Particularly Stephen Chung's JWP and Glenn Rosenthal's JWPce) to find out how to use the public domain JIS font files around. Armed with this knowledge, I implemented a kanji subsystem. Unfortunately, that turned out to be the easiest part! I decided that I should make the program wider in scope than just katakana, to include kanji and so on. This was a bigger task than I anticipated... This program takes question files from its source directory and allows the user to select which files to use, and how many questions to be asked. Answers are typed in in Roman letters, and a constantly-updating score sheet shows the time taken, percentage of correct answers, and progress through the test. Limitations ----------- Although it is possible to use this program to test readings of kanji and kanji compounds, and I have developed a couple of files for the exercises in my kanji textbook, it is difficult to check them, because of the variety of romanizations that are possible. For example: a thousand yen = sen en/sen'en/sennen. I intend in a future release to address this by including a hiragana entry system for entering readings, hopefully with the option of kunrei or hepburn romanizations. For the moment, it is possible as long as the user is prepared to adopt a systematic approach, and this is reflected in the question files' answer fields. There are no mappings for some of the Japanese grahical characters (brackets etc.) so these will be blank. Use ASCII versions instead in the question files. This is a problem with the mapping table from JWPce which I have incorporated into this program. Question Files -------------- These are simply Unicode (16-bit) text files in Intel byte-order, with DOS end-of-line characters (CR LF, or 0x000D 0x000A). If this sounds confusing, don't worry, as it's the standard format for PCs, and can be produced by JWPce's Unicode output format. To add new question files, create a file with the extension ".JPF" and the format detailed below, and save it in the same directory as the application itself (this will be "C:\Program Files\Japanese Flashcards" if you used the self-extracting installation file with its defaults.) The format is quite strict, because I didn't have the inclination to write an idiot-proof file format reader! Stick to the format described below, and there won't be a problem... ____________________________________________ Line 1 |JPFLASH | Line 2 |Desc=Your description here | Line 3 |Prompt=Prompt text for each question | Line 4 |Type=Entry | Line 5 |Question;Answer | |Question;Answer | | : | | : | | : | |Question;Answer | |END | |____________________________________________| Note that: (1) Type is always Entry, as no other methods are yet supported (2) Answer should be an ANSI text string when Type=Entry (ie. always, for now) (3) Multiple possible answers can be given, separated by commas, eg. Question;Answer1,Answer2,Answer3 (4) Don't add any space characters between anything! (5) If there is a format error, the file will not be displayed in the selector screen. Version history --------------- 0.1.2 Redid the splash screen and added an about box. Released the program to the world! 0.1.0 Fixed the kanji test bug (string allocation was too short). 0.0.3 beta Rewrote the internal structure in Unicode instead of JIS, based on the Unicode<->JIS functions used in JWPce. This also fixed a file-reading bug. This was the first version reliable enough to be released beyond the confines of my PC, to a couple of friends. It worked fine for kana tests, but didn't work well with kanji tests.