Koda

Sorry I’ve gone so long without an update… I came down with a rather good cold and a lot of schoolwork over the weekend. On the plus side, I came out of it with a 9 page story for my writing class, which I look forward to getting critiques on tomorrow. Of course, as fate would have it, I also have two tests tomorrow. One is a quiz on the Katakana Japanese syllabary.

In studying the character set, I found two excellent pieces of software for Linux that have made the memorization work a breeze. Here’s a little review of them.

I started by using the excellent langdrill (Ubuntu: apt-get install langdrill) software to get fluid with Hiragana earlier this month. This excellent little program also features swedish and basic french (though I haven’t tried those!) and a variety of methods for drilling yourself on the language. One nice feature is the ability to switch between matching the Japanese character to it’s english character, and vise versa. However, as I got to use langdrill more, I noticed the user interface is a little clunky. Katakana has a lot of little confusing details that are hard to read, and I never could figure out a way to increase the font size in langdrill. Today, I decided to take a look to see if there were any other programs available with a larger display. So, after a bit of digging in synaptic, I discovered…

…just what I was looking for. Kanatest (Ubuntu: apt-get install kanatest) is a wonderful little program that will thoroughly test you on both Hiragana and Katakana (104 characters per syllabary!) with a beautiful large caligraphic display and an excellently simple user interface. It does what it is supposed to and does it well. This little app comes highly reccomended if you ever need to learn the Japanese character sets.

As Kanatest does not include more advanced options or quizzes for Japanese numbers and words, I will definitely be using both it alongside with langdrill in my studies. I hope that this little review has assisted yours!