Korlithiel said:
b_o_b I no longer own a DS, often the control schemes in games were too detrimental to the experience for me to continue enjoying mine.
Drack, I'm a bit surprised to find people who really enjoy that program. I mean, it's fairly good at times but on occasion I found that without inputting the hirigana I couldn't find a Kanji because the program would stubbornly assume you were looking for a different one. I spent more time using Colors! to practice Kanji as I could write the characters a few times, erase, review, and then practice some more and hope to see something as useful and simple for drawing on the Pandora some day.
Off-topic, but...
The key is knowing how
Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten does its handwriting recognition. Most gaijin make the mistake of assuming it just takes a picture of what you wrote and compares it to what the kanji in its database look like. That's not at all what it's doing. What KSRJ really does is look at the
individual strokes, their length, directions, the order you wrote them in, and how many of them you wrote, and compares THAT to its database. If you don't get the
kakikata (how to write) or the
hitsujun (stroke order) right, the software won't recognize the characters well. If you're a little bit off, just touch the character it thought you wrote in the lookup field and it will show close match alternatives. If you know how to properly write characters, nothing beats KSRJ for speed and precision of looking up unknown kanji or words (though multi radical software works well too). Knowing the properties like stroke count/order/direction of a character you don't know is actually not a big deal and usually guessable if you have been building up good writing habits instead of bad ones.
Take, for example, 際, a fifth-grade character. If I didn't know this character and ALSO didn't know that one of the readings is
sai, I would guess the
kakikata to be the left radical first, then upper middle radical, then upper right, bottom. I already know the
hitsujun of the radicals themselves. Bam, first try recognition (and it turns our
my guess was right).
Forget about handwriting English this way. We don't have these concepts in our writing system, so KSRJ is horrible at recognizing English; use the touch keyboard if you want to look up English -> Japanese.
Believe me, when I was in Japan last summer, I had loads of dictionaries, the paper kind, iphone apps, etc... and nothing came close to KSRJ. Since a DS emulator on Pandora is unlikely, this is one app I may look into what open source solutions already exist (like KanjiPad) for handwriting recognition and improve one of them to the level where I no longer would want to use my DS for Japanese study.
Learning Kanji is like rolling a snowball. The more you already know, the faster you can learn more. I know about 1430, and that's still considered illiterate (and no, my avatar is not a real kanji).
