Oldphils Hiragana parser (and other tools)

[Mithrandir]

Hey All,
As some of you know, I'm taking japanese this semester (thanks boss!) I wrote a couple of tools for myself (flash card program, hiragana parsing engine) and asked sensei to look them over for accuracy. She liked them so much, she asked if the whole class could use them. Needless to say, I had to go and clean them up a bit. It struck me, however, that some of you could use these tools. One of them takes romaji in and spits hiragana out. Anyway, feel free to try and learn japanese from them if you want. NOTE: Your web browser must support unicode for these tools to work. Also note: The katakana parser is not yet working either.

http://dlc.deanza.fhda.edu/

Oh yeah, dispite the disclaimer, you can use these tools too.

[Razgriz]

Pretty cool, thanks for the link.

[inkhana]

Wow, that's pretty cool! I wish I knew enough about Japanese to be able to make use of them...^^ One of these days, I'm gonna learn at least a little Japanese! LOL

[Saint]

Very cool. i don't begin learning Japanese till next fall, but this is great. thanks oldphil.

[Shinja]

sweet, this should help alot

[Azier the Swordsman]

I can't seem to figure out how to set my browser to display Japanese characters. If I could, it might be useful though as I'm learning Japanese and I'm now getting into Hiragana.

[Mithrandir]

What kind of computer do you have? We'll go from there. If you run windows, I think you need the global IME to view them. There's a different one for Windows Pre XP and for Win XP and up. Looks like:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/recommended/ime/install.asp
(When you get to the screen, you'll need to select "Global IME for Japanese -- with Language pack")
is for non-XP systems, and:
http://office.microsoft.com/assistance/2002/articles/odownloadinputmethodeditors.aspx
Other users may wish to check these and let me know if they have more complete instructions.

(On a side note, it would be a great reference to have instructions for as many types of computers as we can find. This has come up in many threads, and I'd personally like to see a 'complete' list...)

[Bobtheduck]

Old Phil, that's pretty nice... i definatley will be making use of that! My biggest test so far was wa as a particle but also wa in a word. Watashi wa... It showed up correctly, that's good... So it's great, and the flash cards too.

わたしはうちでにほんごをはなします。

was that right? Did I use the particles correctly Or should I have used "de" twice...

By the way, you need to get a maru in there (you know, the Japanese period "。") and convert . into the maru。And also these things "「」" in place of quotes. Well, you don't NEED to it's just an idea.

[shooraijin]

> [Watashi wa uchi de nihongo o hanashimasu]

Looks correct to me although I've sometimes heard it [nihongo ga hanashimasu] ... the maru is a good idea. I was rather merciless when OldPhil was testing it the first time, particularly on long vowels, double consonants and complex utterances like gya, cha, sha, etc.

[shooraijin]

> I can't seem to figure out how to set my browser to display Japanese characters.

OldPhil already stated how for Windows; Mac OS X should just "do it." (OS 9 requires the Japanese language kit which is on the OS 9 CD.)

Some browsers need a little help; you might look for an Encoding option in the pull-down menus and try something like EUC-JP, Shift-JIS, etc. (Older versions of Netscape sometimes don't autodetect right, for example.)

[Mithrandir]

>I was rather merciless when OldPhil was testing it the first time, particularly on long vowels, double consonants and complex utterances like gya, cha, sha, etc.

Yeah. Thanks, though!

[ShiroiHikari]

d00d. Very cool :] Can't wait for the katakana one ^_^

[Heaven's Cloud]

Nice oldphil! This will help a lot, thank you.

[Azier the Swordsman]

I am using Windows XP. The download says it cannot be installed on my version of windows.

[Mithrandir]

Chris - Did you try the 2nd or 1st link? The first on was for pre-winXP, the 2nd, for XP.

oldphil