Pandora And Japanese

[Zorlee]

Hi everyone!

I'm on the fence of ordering this thing. I've been trying all kinds of "portable" solutions; netbooks, PDAs, iPod touch - but they're either not portable enough (read netbooks) or just lack in the performance part. That's why I'm seriously considering the Pandora.
I'm currently studying Japanese, and my intention for buying this handheld is to use it as a language learning tool. (Especially to use the software ANKI on it). I have a couple of questions about it though:

- Will the OS be translated into other languages, such as Japanese? I really want to use the software included, since I'm... well, not good with Linux, and it looks pretty user-friendly. On the other hand, I really like working with a 100% Japanese OS, since I learn as I use it. Am I in bad luck here?

- Will it work with this program? http://ichi2.net/anki/ ? (probably not easy to say, but I'm you guys will know better than me, hehe!)

- I used Linux Mint for a while, and it included the ANTHY (?) Japanese input. Will I be able to input Japanese with ease on the Pandora, maybe with the use of ANTHY?

Thank you guys so much for your time and patience.
Zorlee...

 

[Vitel]

- Will it work with this program? http://ichi2.net/anki/ ? (probably not easy to say, but I'm you guys will know better than me, hehe!)

Yes, it will, because we have both qt4 and python ported to ARM.

 

[Awakening]

Seems like an interesting app, I've even considered learning Japanese

 

[zhasha]

Anthy is available as well. If they follow gettext standards on Ångström, and I don't see why not, you can set your locale to ja_JP and have all the japanese text you like (provided you have the potfiles installed for the appropriate programs)

 

[Zorlee]

Fantastic. I'm getting one then!
I still hope the Pandora OS will get a Japanese translation, but it looks like the main people on here are English/American/German.
I guess other OS (like Mint/Ubuntu) would be more unstable / less optimized?
Like I said, I'm not good with these things, since my and terminal are arch-enemies, but if I could transform my up-and-coming Pandora into a 100% Japanese mean-machine, then I'm willing to learn. =)

Awakening: It's HIGHLY recommended. My Japanese studies would've died without it, hehe!

 

[zhasha]

The "main people" aren't the ones writing all the software you get with it. They mainly concern themselves with the minimal menu and the kernel + a set of libraries and daemons that you really wouldn't care about being translated. The desktop is powered by whatever you can scour out of the Ångström repos (and the bowels of hell) and that software has for the most part already been translated. You'll see a lot of software from the GNOME DE which is almost always translated into something like 79 different languages including Japanese.
My point is, the pandora devs are not the ones writing the software you care about.

 

[Zorlee]

Ah, thank you very much for clearing that up! =)

 

[renwils]

I'll definitely be installing SCIM on my pandora.
http://www.scim-im.org/

Edit: and I see that it has a plugin for the anthy module

 

[Zorlee]

Sorry for my stupidness, but what is SCIM?
I tried reading up on it on the site, but either there's something wrong with it, or my internet is being a pain. =)

 

[peca]

Sorry for my stupidness, but what is SCIM?
I tried reading up on it on the site, but either there's something wrong with it, or my internet is being a pain. =)

SCIM / About / Features

Features & Goals

Wednesday 15 December 2004

The SCIM project has already achieved a lot of features and the design and implementation of SCIM project are following the goals we are pursuing.

Features

* Fully Object Oriented structure written in C++.
* Highly modularized.
* Very flexible architecture, can be used as a dynamically loaded library as well as a C/S input method environment.
* Simple programming interface.
* Fully i18n support with UCS-4/UTF-8 encoding.
* Include many handy utility functions to speedup the development.
* GUI Panel with very rich features.
* Unified configuration framework.

The goal of SCIM:

* Act as an unified frontend for current available input method libraries. Currently bindings to uim and m17n library are available.
* Act as a language engine of IIIMF input method framework (TBD).
* Provide as many native IMEngines as possible.
* Support as many input method protocol/interface as possible.
* Support as many operating systems as possible.

EDIT:

Why Use SCIM?

Wednesday 15 December 2004

There are many Input Method programs and platforms living in the world, such as XIM, IIIMF, UIM, kinput, XCIN, Chinput etc. Then why we do want another Input Method platform?

First of all, SCIM is a common IM platform written in C++. It abstracts input method interface into several classes and try to make these classes as simple and independent as possible. With such simple interfaces, developers can write their own input method in a few lines of code very easily.
Second, SCIM is highly modularized: most components can be implemented as dynamically loadable modules, thus can be loaded at runtime as you wish. For example, input methods written for SCIM could be IMEngine modules, and users can use such IMEngine modules combined with different interface modules (FrontEnd) in different environment without rewrite/recompile the IMEngine modules.
Third, SCIM is a higher level library comparing with XIM or IIIMF.It has much simpler interface than XIM and IIIMF. And it can work with XIM or even IIIMF (in the future). SCIM can also support client specific input method interface, like gtk2 immodule and qt immodule.

 

[Bigun]

Will ibus be supported?

Well, nevermind, doesn't look like it is made for the ARM arch.

Nonetheless, I'm currently learning Japanese, so this is well within my interests.

 

[Gilrad]

Since we're on this subject again, I thought I would ask again:

I really want to be able to use the Gjiten Japanese dictionary program on the Pandora, but it uses a lot of Gnome libraries and is mostly written for gnome. What are the consequences of using Gnome instead of xfce? Will it break compatibility with programs not written with Gnome in mind? What about if I were to use xfce, but try to run gjiten with all the libraries intact? Like, make (what would probably be) a 100-mb .pnd file of Gjiten and all the gnome dependencies, and try to run it in xfce? Would that work?

I really think Pandora has great potential to be an e-dictionary, and compared to what Korea is putting out in terms of dictionaries, I don't think its strange at all to consider it a dictionary

 

[zhasha]

XFCE is based around a lot of the same libraries as GNOME and all major linux DEs "just work" around eachother. I can run KDE programs in my GNOME session and vice-versa, just like all GNOME programs will run in an XFCE session provided the correct libraries are installed (and the most commonly used libs are already there).

 

[Drack]

I honestly *HATE* Japanese on Linux. SCIM is one of the buggiest apps I've ever used, often crashing X or simply making typing impossible until X is restarted. Tried it on various distros and window managers, it's always SCIM+anthy causing problems.

Anki works great on x86 linux. It's open source and all its deps are already available, so should be no trouble to get on Pandora. I'm an anki user myself. Here's a tip though. For anki to work on anything with a web browser, just enable synchronization on whatever machine(s) it's currently running on, then use http://anki.ichi2.net/study. The fullscreen mode works great on iPhone, for example. Even though there's no decent app for it, the in-browser version works pretty well.

Another interesting thing is that on my install, the standalone anki version uses a serif font where AnkiOnline uses a sans-serif .. I find it important to be able to recognize the characters by the radicals, and using a variety of fonts when I practice helps a lot.

As an aside, I do most of my Japanese study on a Mac. It has by far the best IME software (Kotoeri is WAY better than SCIM or Windows Language Bar), has anki (everything does), and has the incredibly awesome JEDict. If I'm on the go, Nintendo DS has Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten, and iPhone has wwwJDIC and Kotoba free apps, so I'm not too concerned about SCIM's crappiness on Pandora.

 

[zazen666]

I honestly *HATE* Japanese on Linux. SCIM is one of the buggiest apps I've ever used, often crashing X or simply making typing impossible until X is restarted. Tried it on various distros and window managers, it's always SCIM+anthy causing problems.

Anki works great on x86 linux. It's open source and all its deps are already available, so should be no trouble to get on Pandora. I'm an anki user myself. Here's a tip though. For anki to work on anything with a web browser, just enable synchronization on whatever machine(s) it's currently running on, then use http://anki.ichi2.net/study. The fullscreen mode works great on iPhone, for example. Even though there's no decent app for it, the in-browser version works pretty well.

Another interesting thing is that on my install, the standalone anki version uses a serif font where AnkiOnline uses a sans-serif .. I find it important to be able to recognize the characters by the radicals, and using a variety of fonts when I practice helps a lot.

As an aside, I do most of my Japanese study on a Mac. It has by far the best IME software (Kotoeri is WAY better than SCIM or Windows Language Bar), has anki (everything does), and has JEDict. If I'm on the go, Nintendo DS has Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten, and iPhone has wwwJDIC and Kotoba free apps, so I'm not too concerned about SCIM's crappiness on Pandora.

Studying anki via net is certianly an option, and what I was doing over a year ago. Now my deck includes pictures, audio, and probably in the future video clips so it has outgrow simple net review. That is probably why hard core anki users are seeking something like pandora-we hope it will handle it all for years to come (and its looking like it should!!).

 

[marshal]

Drack> I don't remember SCIM cashing my x server ! And my japanese GF is also running Ubuntu and I didn't hear any complain. I do believe you though. SCIM look like it has it's problem. It definitely has some bug that's been unresolved for some time. For example the search in Nautilus basically never works properly if you have japanese support installed (I talking about the search as you type feature). I am sure there are a lot of other bugs listed on Ubuntu bug tracker for example. Actually Ubuntu 9.10 uses i-bus so thing are maybe changing. Currently I am running the latest Opensuse with KDE 4 and no problem yet with japanese input.

And yes the Windows japanese input is clearly a lot better than on linux (haven't used the mac japanese input though). It has only one major issue: keyboard layout you can't easily change (maybe it's diferent in windows 7 couldn't find the setting though) but that's it. Handwriting support is great and it work great overall. I like the Japanese explanation for word with the same reading and different kanji.
Now windows application not properly supporting unicode is another issue.

 

[Mr.Gonzo]

Using the Panda has a translator for traveling would be totally brilliant.

 

[Wheels]

Using the Panda has a translator for traveling would be totally brilliant.

*types in "Greetings!", sets language English->German*
"Hellolo!"