On Wed, 12 Mar 2003, Brian wrote:
> I have also set up my English PDA so it does kanji handwriting
> recognition along with a dictionary, but I have become frustrated with
> trying to use that in any practical situation.
Well, I use a Japanese PDA (a Sony Clie I bought in Japan), and after
buying ATOK for Palm, my life is much happier. The kanji recognition is
not perfect, but it does the job for looking up a lot of kanji in the
dictionary, and just generally doing kanji entry to improve my writing
skills. Even more important, in a way, is that I can now do direct
hiragana entry into the little boxes at the bottom, rather than entering
romaji and converting (which was just too weird to try to do when you're
working with a pen).
However, there are other dictionary options available. Unfortunately,
I'm actually going to have to go back on topic for a moment to discuss
this :-), and worse yet it involves someone on the list, but let me put
in my plug for Tangotown. They let you do kanji lookups using SKIP,
which I've found to be one of the easiest methods around, and since it's
done from your keitai, it's always in your pocket. (If you don't know
SKIP, you really, really want to buy _The Kanji Learner's Dictionary_,
by Jack Halpern.)
> Looking far into the future, but maybe not too far,
> altered reality (sort of translucent VR for those
> unfamiliar with it) will overlay the Kanji with the
> hiragana, making studying Kanji unessary.
I don't know about that. Personally, I find mixed kanji and hiragana
much easier to read than hiragana-only. This is due to having so many
different ways to say the kanji in Japanese: even if I don't know the
word itself, I can often get an idea of the meaning from the kanji that
make up the word. (E.g., even if you didn't know how to say the word
"kyou," which pronounciation comes from I don't know what planet, when
you see the characters "ima" (now) and "nichi" (day) side by side, it's
pretty darn obvious what the meaning is.)
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.netbsd.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Thu Mar 13 02:23:05 2003