kanjiPod

After the introduction of iPod Software 2.0, the Apple iPod family of music players gained the ability to display text files, with some simple provisions for hyperlinks and so on. If you have an iPod supporting this version of the software ( iPod version 3.0 and higher ), you can use kanjiPod to generate sets of files for studying Japanese characters.

The program is written in Python, and if you wish to customise it's operation, you can download it and play with it. It no longer has external dependencies on encoding libraries, but you will have to download and uncompress kanjidic and edict in the same folder. It is licensed under a Creative Commons license.

The information that is used to compose these files comes from the excellent electronic dictionaries EDICT and KANJIDIC, both of which are maintained by Jim Breen of Monash University, possibly the patron saint of Japanese Study in the internet age.

Why are only Subsets of Kanjidic available?

For reasons known best to the iPod engineers, iPods will only allow 1000 notes. In a perfect world, we could have a large directory containing all the Kanji, and then several "virtual directories" organising the Kanji into various categories. For the moment, this is impossible. Also of note is that each file can only be four kilobytes long - some very commonly compounded Kanji will easily exceed this if you do not restrict the available compounds, and will be marked as such.

What's new in 2.0?

2.0 represents a bit of a change in direction away from a study tool and towards a usable tool for day to day use. kanjiPod now only represents the top 1,000 most frequently used Kanji ( as shown by the Shimbun Survey ) and is indexed using Jack Halpern's S.K.I.P. index system. With only a few minutes spent reading that link, and some practice, you should be able to easily look up Kanji you see in the wild. Unfortunately, the vocabulary selection is somewhat newspaper centered by it's very nature, but I was unable to find another comprehensive source of frequency data.

How do I install these sets?

Download, unzip, and you should have four directories representing the four classes of SKIP Kanji. Drag into the "Notes" directory on your iPod when you have it mounted in disk mode. Every time you reboot or change the contents of your notes folder and then go to the "Notes" function on your iPod, it has to re-check the files for errors, and this can take a while, but only has to be done the first time. The output of this program has been tested on a G3 iPod, and on a 4Gb Nano, but please send in your bug reports or suggestions to <curious@progsoc.org>.

Keep in mind that as you can only have 1,000 files total, any other notes you have will be sucking away Kanji from your set.

Download:

I liked the old way better, can I still get those files?

Sure. You can find them here!

Shimbun + Radicals: This contains 844 Kanji, along with 156 Radical Indexes. It's built from the Shimbun survey, and is probably the most useful set for general use ( it's what I use on my iPod ). It was generated using `-s -r`. [ download ]

(Almost) all of Jouyou 1-6: Six Kanji had to be trimmed. No indexes, but the Kanji are sorted by Jouyou level. Only compounds with Jouyou Kanji are presented. Generated with `-g1 -g2 -g3 -g4 -g5 -g6 -l`. [ download ]

JLPT 3 & 4: These sets may not be 100% accurate. Contains ( perhaps ) the JLPT 3/4 Kanji sets. Only pure Kanji compounds using these sets are presented. Generated with `-j3 -j4 -l -p`. [ download ]