Kotoba will now be tweeting a few more kanji every day with the aim of better aiding Japanese learners. In particular, Kotoba will begin to tweet kanji based on their JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) level, 1 through 4. Hopefully this will prove itself useful to those who want to focus on characters more specific [...]
Kotoba’s base set of information is nearing another milestone: radicals （部首【ぶしゅ】or ‘bushu‘）. Radicals are the base components that can be used to describe an ideogram, often most strongly associated with Chinese characters （漢字【かんじ】or ‘kanji‘). We have used the source from RadicalKanji to provide the relationships between our Japanese characters. This information allows us to more [...]
There are now a few more refinements to Kotoba’s interface. Of some note is that the character filter is now available from the characters page directly. Just click on “Character Display” in the upper-right to select what type of character family you want to view. This functionality used to be available on all pages even [...]
It is now possible to add comments to words and characters on Kotoba. This feature allows you to write your own comments about a specific word or character that can be viewed by other users. Ultimately, I hope this facilitates you to share your linguistic nuances or insights that you feel might be appreciated by [...]
In an attempt to generalize ourselves, we have moved vocabulary lists to study lists. This is in recognition that our vocabulary lists can now include characters, not just words. To boot, in the future we would like to add grammar and example sentences to our study lists thereby making them as complete as possible for [...]
Kotoba achieved another important milestone this evening. Characters! As alluded to in previous posts, my work has been focused on developing a language-agnostic model of language characters. The work is heavily inspired on Kanjidict which is also the source of the 10,000+ chinese characters that are now a part of Kotoba.
Back in the day of MySQL 4, UTF-8 was a relatively straight-forward thing. You declared the charset to be utf-8 and behold! so it was. Fast-forward to today and ensuring your database is actually supporting UTF-8 is not so straight-forward. I had noticed some issues with Kotoba that I thought resolved around collation (the linguistic [...]
Well, maybe sexy is too strong a word for most people. But if you are like me, then data modeling is sexy. And if that is the case then Kotoba can be particularly sexy. One of the main objectives at this point in Kotoba’s development is ensuring the entity-relationships are modeled correctly. While no easy [...]
In an attempt to help clarify where Kotoba is at, we have appropriately adorned Kotoba with a β (beta) moniker to help ensure everyone knows what to expect. And by “what to expect” I mean to expect Google’s definition of beta; usable but constantly growing in functionality. For the curious, I used Gimp and this [...]
Kotoba wants to be your friend! In what will be an interesting experiment in social networking, Kotoba now befriends other Twitter users who make posts that match a predefined list of words or the word of the moment. The idea is for Kotoba to reach out to like-minded Twitters in hopes they are interested in [...]