

Show HN: Weekend Project - Japanese Wordsearch Builder - trydionel
http://japanese.trydionel.com

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trydionel
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!

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quant18
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/>

~~~
trydionel
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 :)

~~~
donw
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

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ebun
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

~~~
trydionel
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.

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kazuya
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?

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trydionel
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).

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

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kentosi
すごい！Very nicely done.

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

~~~
trydionel
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!

