Show HN: Weekend Project - Japanese Wordsearch Builder | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Weekend Project - Japanese Wordsearch Builder

japanese.trydionel.com

17 pointstrydionel13 comments

Hi HNers,

I wanted to demo my weekend project, an online Japanese word search builder. I'm currently studying the language and have been looking for some more interactive educational material than the usual barrage of textbooks. I especially enjoyed the word search puzzle included in my hiragana book and thought it would be fun to recreate it. I've built out support for roman-to-hiragana translations so far, and plan to add roman-to-katakana soon.

As for the technical details, the site is built on Sinatra and hosted on Heroku (using their new Ruby 1.9 stack!). The front-end is jQuery.

Hope someone else finds it as useful and fun as I do!

Clean and simple. I like it. For a more advanced puzzle, you could also put kanji instead of romaji in the "word list" (basically it would be a test of the user's ability to remember how the kanji were read.)

One bug I noticed --- it is showing ぢ for "ji". Except in a very few cases, that should be じ. "zu" should also usually be ず (but づ is not uncommon, e.g. つづける).

If you're gonna keep working on it, EDICT (a Japanese-English dictionary) may be helpful --- the data is freely reusable for both commercial and non-commercial purposes: http://www.edrdg.org/

Yea, the romanization rules are only approximate at best. It won't properly transcribe 'doozo' either. I'd like to support some more advanced translations, but I'm trying to take baby steps -- both with the language and the program!

I've visited EDICT once or twice so far, but didn't realize they allowed reuse of their data. I'll pursue that further!

Thanks for the suggestions :)

I've done a lot of work with the EDICT data, so shoot me a message if you run into any weirdness: don AT madwombat.com

Otsukarasamadeshita! Nice app! I find it pretty useful

What kind of input validation are you doing? It doesn't seem to prevent invalid characters. For example, I put in words with 'q' and 'l'--2 letters not represented in hiragana--and was able to generate puzzles

Currently -- none at all. This assumes a rather familiar audience :) I'm hoping to flesh it out to be a bit more user friendly soon.

Also, arigato gozaimasu! I appreciate the kind words :)

Well done, but I ran into an unfamiliar word: what's 'kombon (こんぼん)'?

Or... is it just to learn romaji-kana transliteration and not about real words?

Hehe, that's actually a typo for komban! I just quick copied some vocabulary from one of my books to seed the word list and clearly didn't double-check my work :)

That aside, this tool is intended for character recognition than actual vocab study (at least in its current state). I'm hoping to add some new translation support eventually though (straight from english to kana+kanji would be nice).

I'm going to Japan in a while to study Japanese, this will most definitely come in hand! :D

すごい！Very nicely done.

nicely done. I would be interested to see the JS code that you used to help user select the words in cells

Thanks! You can actually check out the JS by viewing http://japanese.trydionel.com/application.js. I must warn you though, I'm not a JS wiz by any means!

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