JAlphabet
Blimey, it’s been a while. Well, I’ve been rather busy (who isn’t?!?). I’ve had a paper accepted for a journal (which is a first for me), a paper at an international conference, and a couple of papers accepted at various conference workshops. For me, a lot of it revolves around a Arabic language processing, and a program I’ve started called aConCorde. The problem is, I don’t speak Arabic! Whilst it hasn’t hindered me so far, it’s something I’d really like to do. The first hurdle for me has been simply getting to grips with the completely new alphabet. Although I have a book, and there are many web pages with the alphabet, I wanted something to test me, and that’s why I started making a simple little app called JAlphabet.
It’s still rather rusty at the moment, which is why I’ve not actually released any code yet. But the main screen looks a little like this:
Yep, it’s another one of those pesky Java apps that I can’t stop myself from writing! However, like with Jacman, I don’t want to produce apps with the standard Java aethestics. This is clearly borrowing from Apple, with a brushed metal theme. I think it looks great, over all. What you can’t see is the fade in/out effects when you hover over a button. Of course, I didn’t do all the hardwork myself - I’ve made use of an excellent, and very flexible, Java Look ‘n’ Feel called Substance. I’m not saying my interface is perfect at the moment, but I think it’s basically there and only needs some tweaks (like window and font sizes).
Anyway, it’s very nice that I can test my grasp of the Arabic alphabet, but then came a recent challange at work where, for reasons I can’t disclose, it would be advantagous if I could understand a little bit of Japanese - or at least grasp which of the many Japanese alphabets a given word is written in. So, I’ve just started to abstract the code a little so it becomes a generic tester for any language to care to supply:
I’m currently writing a new intro screen where you get to select the language/alphabet that you wish to test. There is a basic summary screen at the end when you finish the test (or click Finish) which tells you your score and displays the items you got right and wrong. This too needs some more work, but it’s generally it’s there. Hopefully I’ll get to release the first version sometime this week.
February 28th, 2006 at 6:58 am
Since i’m trying to get a grasp of japanese as well, i was looking for applications to learn with.
I found kanatest to be quite nice to learn katakana/hiragana - and learning them helped me a lot so far.
you really should take a look at it, especially how they do the statistics after the tests and the possibility to get wrong ones asked over and over again.
anyway, i think it is great to have a java-application for that (wich provides multiple alphabets at once), since i think there is a real need for them (the learning-tools) on all platforms.
However, keep up the good work