Monday 13 January 2014

Kobo Japanese ebook


I have purchased what I took to be an updated version of Kenneth Yasuda's old book on haiku at kobobooks.

Ahem. The book proved to be Adobe DRM as a download from Kobo, but regardless, even in the Kobo Desktop Reader the book was nothing new and certainly not "e" in any sense.

The worst flaw in my view is that this Tuttle re-edition has no Japanese to accompany the 31 haiku appended to the 1950's text.

In 2014 one might have expected to see not only Unicode Japanese kanji and kana but also links to alternative translations.

At least with a paperbound edition I might pencil in some kanji and hiragana.

And then there are the typo's in the text.

And yes, Tuttle is not WhiteRabbit or Kodansha, but this text lacks even rōmaji for those selected haiku.

Worse yet : in the Kobo Desktop Reader, the pagination allows poems to be split across pages. How's that for the importance of 'cutting' at a word in hokku ?

~

Wednesday 18 September 2013

kanji pairs study tip #1


Here is a kanji pairs study tip.

When pairing-up two kanji to form a mnemonic, take note of which of them tends to be in kanji compounds more often first and which more often last.

You may be surprised by what you discover about vocabulary that you want to retain.

And now you see something else that makes that pair natural to you in the order A - B rather than B - A.

Here is one of my examples :

 観 ・ 験 

And these happen to Tuttle flashcards 634 and 635.

Btw, look what you find at http://kotobank.jp/word/観験kangen !

It was just a case of 直観 ?




250 Essential Kanji for Everyday Use, Bk1


Book 1 of the Tuttle series "250 Essential Kanji" has the oddity ( in my edition ) of not only having no Unicode value for a kanji but also no Tuttle flashcard number.

Take page 121, for example.

The kanji are entries 139, 140 and 141.

These are 証 確 and .

Their Tuttle flashcard numbers are 754, 805 and 978.

If you are interested in an Android app to accompany the book, drop a note at info AT aule-browser.com and I'll convert some Curl RIA desktop code into Curl CAEDE code and we'll have that app.

The app would show you that these kanji are

証  ショウ / あかし  8A3C
確  カク·コウ / たし.か·たし.かめる  78BA
認  ニン / みと.める·したた.める  8A8D

If you know the 4-character Unicode utf-16 value then I have a simple app that gives you a version of that kanji that you can then cut-n-paste into a web page, a URL address or a Word document – or into a Find field in a Japanese page that is encoded in EUC or Shift or which ever JIS or other encoding is confounding your search. One ring of code to bind them all.

Btw, their Kodansha Essential Kanji entries are 1672, 1409 and 1690.

And which two of the above kanji form the verb kakuninsuru ?  Sooo desu ne !