Thank you very much for making your great program better and better all the time!
Best regards,

toMOTko 0.8.0 has been released.

It contains bug fixes and minor improvements.

Here is the change log :

- Added missing digraphs.
- Fixed comment update bug in the quiz.
- Fixed multiple terms deletion.
- Improved FileDialog for import/export feature.
- Improved menus' look with icons.
- Added keyboard accelerators.
- Show word count in congratulation message.

Feedback is welcome.

Thank you very much! I will try it and report back.

EDIT: I tried it and it works like a charm! File selections speeds the process up greatly. Thank you!

Glad to hear that! You're welcome.

I have tried it and love it. Awesome. This is a major new release! Hotkeys are great.

I know it's been a while you asked for this feature. I'm glad you like it. Credit must be given to ZBEDic's authors as I borrowed most of the code for the implementation of shortcuts and the new FileDialog.

Here is one quirk that I have noticed. It seems you have added the scrollbar to the Examples/Comments window. It only appears when the text is too large for the window. When the scrollbar appears it takes space "eating"/covering one or two characters of text on the right.

Edit: Strange, after I open the card again, it reflows the text, and the problem disappears.

A suggestion: Now that we have hotkeys, the buttons at the bottom are optional. Would it be possible to have them disappear (in the preferences, or as a hotkey) or have a switch between big/small buttons leaving more space for comments/examples window? It would also be great if you could maximize the comments window similar to how Zdict and Zten (variant) do it with their windows.

I realize that this probably requires significant coding.

Zten/Ztenv is open source. Even Zdict should be open source (with some encryption module). Maybe their code could be useful.

http://ebsnap.lkj.jp/zaurus/
http://cvs.sourceforge.jp/cgi-bin/viewcvs....kages-ja/ztenv/
http://www.gohome.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/zten/

This problem has been there since the very first version of toMOTko. It doesn't happen very often fortunately. And when it does, it only does it once. I think it's a bug in Qt API but I'm not sure. When it happens, it seems that the scrollbar needs about 3 seconds to paint itself, after the text field has been rendered. Because of that, the text is laid out as if there was no scrollbar. I've tried many things to fix the problem but hasn't found a solution yet. I have some other ideas to try though. It was not my priority but I could take another look at it.



I think a preference option to show/hide the buttons would be easy to do. About the comments window maximizing feature, I will have to check zdict as I don't know what you're talking about. The version of zten I'm using doesn't have such a feature.

For the next release, here is what I plan to do :

- Compress data files (zlib); (already done)
- Metadata for glossaries and folders;
- Separate digraphs definition into a text file;
- Save xml data files in binary;
- Finish Copy/Cut/Paste (this one is overdue);
- Bug fixes

1. Huh, if the bug has been there all along, and I have just noticed it (and it corrected itself), then it's not a priority. Nobody else complained.

2. Here is what I mean. In zten variant (or zdict), when you perform search, you see a search results window on the left and the entry window on the right. If you press the right arrow key (on your joystick), then the entry window maximizes almost fullscreen to take over the space from the results window (the left button does the same but for the search results window). If you press the OK button it also switches the views. In zdict there is an icon for the same function (the OK key also works but not as well as in ztenv).

This option could make the examples window even more useful. Currently, if there is lots of text in there it's hard to scroll up and down and we can only see two or three lines of text at a time. With that option we could maximize the window (it would take over the Entry Word and Translation Word windows to examine the examples/comments window by using the joystick and then return back to the regular view.

By the way, what is the limit for the examples/comments field? I presume there must be some sort of limit, right?


Hm. I have not asked for images and sounds thinking that it would complicate the program but I see that Frederic is actually thinking about it:



This will open some new opportunities. For me, I will be able to insert stroke order charts in the example window (that's when we will need an option to maximize the example/comment window. However, it would complicate the simple file format for the study lists (I presume xml would include links and images/sounds would be kept in a container file separately.

Once's this is all done there will be nothing else left but to add a search functionality to make it a dictionary in itself


Here are some ideas from my brainstorming:

1. the tomotko could keep track of the progress (number of errors for each word) for each session;
2. based on this progress report, the user could have tomotko unselect all the words with 0 (or 1, 2 ... set by the user) errors, and run the test again only with cards that have generated 1 (or 2, 3, ...) errors. Alternatively, the tomotko could automatically create a new study lists containing words with 1 (or 2, 3, 4...) errors.

Hi, koan. Have you had a chance to compile a JLPT4 study list? We have not forgotten

Maybe you don't know but there are already some glossaries available containing the words of the JLPT on toMOTko's website in the Glossaries section.

Also, thanks again for the clarifications and suggestions. This motivates me to keep working on the application and improve it.

Got it. I put it on the to-do. I will try to implement something similar.

EDIT: I implemented it today [Sunday]. Indeed, it was a good idea. I really like it. I also added a preference option option to hide the buttons in the quiz, even though it's not that much useful now that the comment field can be maximized.



Yes, there is a limit. If you put too much text, an infinite loop will occur. The last time I checked that however, the field capacity was large enough that I didn't care so much about it. This too, is on the to-do for quite a while but it's low priority.



Most probably that when you will export a glossary with references to external resources (like images and sounds), the result file will be an archive containing the xml glossary file (with links to resources) and referred resources. This way, someone importing the glossary will also be able to import the referred resources. That's also because of this that I have recently introduced zlib library. With zlib, I'm able to compress the data files and I think I should also be able to package a group of files into an archive.

So far, using zlib to compress the data is worth it. To give you an idea : before zlib, launching toMOTko was taking 16 seconds and the data were taking 2.6 MB. After using zlib, it takes 12 seconds to start toMOTko and 1.0 MB for data.



These features are on the to-do as well.

Damn! I've been side tracked by a lot of other stuff: I realised that vocabulary was my priority not kanji.

As Frederic says, there are JLPT lists for toMOTko, but IMHO not very specific - just big lists. I have the Unicom level 4 preparatory book and I've been noting all the kanji that are "more than very basic". Therefore my list is not very specific either.

By the way, adding stroke order diagrams sounds very specific to learning Kanji. Sure other languages have stroke order but most other languages don't have several thousand characters.

You are da man!


I am attaching study lists for the first three lessons of Nihongo Shoho (Basic Course in Japanese) textbook. They contain Japanese words and English translations (plus Spanish translation in the comment section). There are 34 lessons. If I have time I will make them all some time.

The info is coming from two websites:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/M...bio/ns01jis.htm
http://www.kahome.co.uk/japa/tango.pl?mo=0...fm=01&to=21

Thanks again Kurochka.

I think it would be "cleaner" to move the comments in Spanish translations in the XML format. This way, it would allow 2 things :

1) People who don't care about Spanish translations will have the choice to skip this data when importing the glossary file. More than that, it allows users to pick either English and Japanese or English and Spanish or Japanese and Spanish or all of them.

2) Prevent a display problem related to font. You may have not noticed but depending of your font preferences in toMOTko the problem occurs. What happens is that the application tries to pick the best font according to the selected languages (in this case : English and Japanese). The application has no way of knowing that the comments are written in Spanish. Because of that, the chosen font may be good to display Japanese and English but not Spanish. In my case, the Spanish accents are displayed as squares. Of course, I could change my font preferences to use unifont, for example, as a workaround but I don't really like it.

I think I could easily make a script to do that. I will send you the transformed scripts and you can tell me what you think.

Please send me an example so I could understand what you mean. I am using the MioFlash->toMOTko converter because it's the easiest way for me to create toMOTko vocabulary lists (remember, I am not a programmer), and I don't think it supports the thing you are describing. Right now, the input for that converter is



Maybe you could add an optional field after the comment, say "otherlang". Later all I would have to do is to replace "otherlang" with the tag for the proper language.

Or maybe we could come up with a similar simple format that could be easily converted to proper toMOTko XML. Working on XML with a simple text editor is difficult for me.

No hay problema. I understand that very well. That's why I offered to do the script myself. When it's done I will send you the converted files. I don't think it's necessary to modify the MioFlash->toMOTko tool just for that. This case is an exception and it's probably not worth it, I think. Of course, if I'm wrong, I may add an additional tool later to easily perform this transformation.

Your contribution is very appreciated even though you're not a programmer

@Kurochka:

Here is the transformation script (written in Ruby) :



I've not decided yet if I will make a web interface similar to MioFlash converter. I'm not sure other people will use it. If someone else is interested, please let me know.

The attached file is an archive containing the transformed glossaries.

Make a new folder and import the new glossary files into toMOTko. For each file, a dialog should appear warning you that the imported glossary contains translations in more than 2 languages. You can choose the languages that you have an interest into. For example, if you don't care about Spanish, you're free to uncheck it. In my case, I checked all the languages and clicked Ok. Once the import is done, you should be able to select Japanese, English and Spanish in the language selectors (at the top of the Glossary Manager). If you want to practice Spanish, you choose English and Spanish and start a quiz (of course, you need to check some words to study, first).

I think it's more convenient like that. Your glossary files become interesting even for someone who doesn't care about Japanese. Also, someone who is learning only Japanese doesn't have to import the Spanish translations that are useless for him/her.

What do you think?

EDIT: I took a look at those two websites you mentioned before. They contain a lot of interesting data and in a very consistent way. I think I will write a script to extract all the data and automatically make toMOTko's glossary files from it.

Thank you.

Here are the remaining lessons (4 and 5 are in the same form as were 1 and 2, the other ones are just in Japanese/Spanish txt files plus there is a separate file for English translations). The websites that I gave have English translations for lessons 1-15. The file in the archive includes English for other lessons as well. This is all in raw form. Maybe it will be easier for you to convert into toMOTko because I do it manually.

Look at the program on that site http://www.kahome.co.uk/nip30.exe ?
I think it is drawing kanji from scratch by getting coordinates from files ending in .sym. A very interesting approach in 1999.

There are some other interesting things on that site:

http://www.kahome.co.uk/japa/ibtango.htm

http://www.kahome.co.uk/japa/ibkanji.htm

http://www.kahome.co.uk/japa/ibbumpoo.htm

I think so too. Thanks for extracting the data. That should ease the script development to generate the toMOTko files. I will let you know as soon as I'm done.



Interesting indeed. The application is not bad at all and works flawlessly.



Thanks again! You're very resourceful.

Unfortunately, the order of the words in Spanish and English differs so it's not as easy as I thought to generate the glossary files.

Still, here are the lessons 6 and 7, in your format (with the comments field containing the Spanish translation). I think it's better for me to concentrate on coding toMOTko instead. I may spend some time converting other Shoho files but if I do, I will begin with the last lessons first, and proceed downward. In other words, from lesson 34, then 33, 32, and so on. This way, we can work together on this task without collisions.

Deal.

I had to get the English portion from a number of sources, so it is not consistent with the Spanish one. Sorry.
In any case, don't get sidetracked. This is not a big deal.

Last week-end, I implemented a new feature on toMOTko which saves the quiz's state before exiting the application. This way, it's possible to resume the previously started quiz when you restart the application. This is useful when you have a lot of selected words to study. For the moment, only the last quiz can be saved and resumed.

I was wondering : Do you think it would be useful to be able to save more than the last quiz's state? Like maybe save a quiz's state into a file so you can resume it later. I think it would be useful, for example, if you're learning more than 1 language or if you're learning different sets of words.

In the same idea, I wonder if it would also be interesting to be able to save the selection of words. I mean, the state of the checkboxes in the Glossary Manager. Kurochka mentioned in a previous message to have a feature which would allow to remove words that seems well known (statistically like if you have 0 error for one word). I think this could be implemented with loadable/savable selections.

I still have to think some more about it. If you have some good ideas/suggestions about this, I would be welcome to hear from you. I'm looking for solutions that do not make the interface too complicated. I think it's already loaded enough. I would like to keep things as simple as possible.

State-save for the quiz is a useful feature. However, personally I do not see a *need* for more than one. It will complicate the interface (a separate menu item to select which save to resume, a save dialog window to choose the name for the save, etc.) Study lists are usually of manageable size. What would be the practical purpose of switching between quizzes back and forth?

However, I think keeping all sorts of statistics would be very useful (numerical, graphs?). Seeing how well/bad you are doing creates psychological incentives, and helps you to identify the areas that need improvement. For example, recently I wanted to know how many words I had learned so far in Japanese. The only way I knew how to do it without counting words in each study list that I have learned was to select all these lists and go through the combined quiz. At the end, there was a notice that I had learned four hundred something words. However, I know that some words are 100% memorized but I have trouble with others.

In my case, this would be useful because I'm studying Japanese, Spanish, and German. So let's say I start a very long quiz in Japanese on Monday. Of course, I cannot complete it because the study list contains more than 300 words. The next day, if I feel like learning German, I will lose the state of the Japanese quiz as soon as I start a new quiz. I wish I could resume the Japanese quiz on Wednesday. And why not, resume the German quiz on Thursday...

That's the use case.

I'm not sure the loading/saving the selection itself is useful, but loading/saving quizzes could be useful (at least, it would be, for me ) to satisfy this use case.

Actually, to make things simpler, maybe I could have one saved quiz state per language pair. So if I start a quiz with fr_de (French -> German), and quit. The quiz would be saved and resumable only if the language indicators are fr_de. If I start a quiz in en_ja (English -> Japanese) and then later, select Resume Quiz, the latest quiz in en_ja would be restored. That could be an interesting option that would not modify the interface at all and suits my short terms needs. What I don't like about this is that the handling of saved quizzes is not explicit to the user. This behavior will have to be explained in the documentation. The advantage though is that it won't bother people that are learning just one language, and I suspect that this is the majority of toMOTko's users. That seems like a good compromise.

EDIT: I implemented this option yesterday. It works like a charm. If you just learn one language, you will not even notice it's there. And if you learn more than one language, you will be able the resume a quiz for each learnt language.



I began to address this a little bit. I've introduced a Properties panel on which I display the count of words, glossaries and folders. I will probably add other statistics in there in time. If I can, I would like to use graphs as I think it could be fun to do and to see. But to tell the truth, I have not given much thought about this aspect.

I think that if the algorithm that picks the next word to be asked was able to consider these statistics that I won't need to load/save the words selection so I probably don't need that.

Good stuff.

Could you see if you could convert the following kanji list from Genki I to tomotko format? If so, please break them up into separate lessons (from #3 to #12 as indicated in the file). I think the tabbed examples should go to the comments section.

The info is taken from http://www.csus.edu/indiv/s/sheaa/projects...kanji_main.html

I may do the same for lessons 13 through 23.

Here you go. If you see anything wrong, let me know.



If you can provide me the data in the same format, I can run the same script I wrote for the previous lessons in a few minutes.

Hi there,

I just recently found tomotko and started using it to expand my vocabulary. Now, what I would like to do is to build voc lists from things I look up in a dictionary. While this kind of works with copy & paste, it is incredible tedious, since I have to go back and forth between the dictionary (zbedic or ztenv) and tomotko. I wonder if there is a way to make this interaction better for what I think this should be quite a frequent use case, no?
How are you building up your glossaries?

Ctop

Zaurus user for 5 years -- B500 -> C860 -> C1000

Hi Ctop,

So far, I either use copy-paste from Zten (most of the time), write new words myself (typing), or convert existing vocabularies found on the net. I agree with you, I wish it would be less tedious. This feature is on the todo list for quite a long time but other things have higher priority for the moment.

I think it would be possible to interoperate with other applications if they are programmed accordingly, using QCopChannel messages. It's something I've never tried. I don't know if Zten or Zbedic already support this. I doubt so but I will check the code, just in case.

Frederic,

Thanks for converting the Kanji study lists for Genki. Here is the remainder if you don't mind.






The Opie Reader has code to send words to zbedic, and it works like a charm. I presume that there must be a way to do the reverse, i.e., send words from zbedic to an outside application.

As Frederic mentioned, if you are dealing with lots of words, it is easier to prepare your list in a text editor (I use simplified format) and then convert it to tomotko format with this tool.

Voila!

Frederic, kurochka,

Thanks for your answers.



Right, Opie Reader and also FBreader do this. I think it has to be in the sending application, so it probably has to come from the dictionary. Or is there some kind of general scripting available for the Zaurus? I have to look into that, maybe.




Thanks. Yes, I guess for larger lists this is the way to go. But it would be handy to pick things up as you go.

best,

Ctop

Frederic,

I have my next top feature request.

Could you please make hotkeys (selectable or fixed - up and down on the joystick) for scrolling the comment window?
As you've seen I've put lots of examples of kanji words into the comment section, and I need to scroll up and down all the time. The new feature of maximizing the comment section will help when you release the new version of tomotko; however, scroll hotkeys will still be very useful.

It's funny because I had a similar idea but with left - right key to scroll the 3 top fields (term, alt, and term). Ok, I will try to implement it. Hopefully, it will be in the next release, that is planned for Christmas, by the way.

Can't wait for the upcoming release! Yey!

Do you think it is possible to allow for integration of kanji animations from the following project?

http://www.kanjicafe.com/using_soder.htm

The license is unique; however, it does allow for use of the diagrams in free electronic (not paper) projects.

It could be that outright integration would complicate things (attribution, etc.); however, I do not think creating conditions for users to add diagrams on their own would require attribution, linking to the authors' site and inclusion of the license.

If I implement image support into toMOTko, I will try to make it as general as possible. I don't want to introduce exceptions or special cases for Japanese (or another language). So for a word, you will be allowed to associate one image. You will be free to associate an animated kanji image to a word if you want. I have never displayed an animated gif with Qt but I expect it to work fine.

I read the license quickly and I don't see any problem with it. I think we could use these images in toMOTko. I've already added a description field for glossaries (next version). We could use this field to write information pointing to their website if needed and, vice-versa, we could give them toMOTko's website URL if we distribute glossary files using the images.

Thanks for the link. Indeed, that would be very cool and useful to use these images in toMOTko!

Sounds like a good approach.

I have a separate question. You will be using zlib for the new version, right? I have installed zlib-eb 1.2.3v01 on my Zaurus (http://ebsnap.lkj.jp/zaurus/). I believe it's for EPWING dictionaries that I have compressed but I may be wrong. Will this version be sufficient?

I'm using zlib_1.2.3. I found it somewhere on the net. The numbers match so maybe it will be enough. I will test it and tell you the outcome.

It doesn't work. The good news is that zlib is small : ~45Kb and doesn't conflict with the other package.

Ho! Ho! Hooo! Merry Christmas!!!

Version 0.9.0 of toMOTko has just been released!

This release contains important changes in terms of data format and implementation. I hope the upgrade will be smooth for everybody. Constructive feedback is welcome.

Enjoy!

P.S.: Here are some features planned for the next release :

- Save the remaining xml data in compressed binary.
- Implement import/export for folders.
- Save/load interface state when quitting/starting the application.

Nothing particularly exciting but this is a prerequisite step before implementing images (and sounds) for terms.

Thank you, Frederic. This is awesome!

I'll install and report.

----------

Comments after the install.

- The maximize function works as intended. Thanks. The same goes for scrolling the comments field with the keys.

- There is some sort of a bug with the cut/paste function for study lists. Here is what happens. I had some study lists in the root directory (they were preserved from the previous version). I created a new folder, cut one of the lists, selected the newly created folder and pressed paste icon. The application shut down. I repeated the same thing over and over. The same bug. However, when I create a blank study list in the new directory and open/expand the directory (i.e., from + to -), I can paste the study list without a problem.

Thanks for reporting so quickly.

This is the kind of bugs I was worrying about. I'm able to reproduce it so I will fix it ASAP.

I think I've fixed the bug. Release 0.9.1 is available.

@kurochka : Tell me if it still crashes or no.

Edit: I just found another bug : When resuming a previously started quiz, if you had moved some terms that were selected for quiz (and I mean cut & pasted the terms elsewhere or at the same place, actually) , they won't be found by the quiz and the quiz page will appear kind of blank. In such case, it's better to start a new quiz instead of resuming the previous one. Although it's annoying, it's not as serious as the cut & paste bug and I will probably fix it when I release v0.10.0... unless someone really needs it quickly.

Thanks.

I think you fixed the bug that I reported earlier.


There is another bug. I used to be able to copy characters so that I could then paste them into a dictionary. I can't copy now without going into the Edit mode.

Have you seen a program called Anki? Any ideas for tomotko?

http://repose.cx/anki/

Good.



It's a side-effect of the vertical and horizontal scrolling arrows feature. I will check what I can do about that. I don't know when though. I left Japan to go to my birth town. My father is very ill and I will have to spend some time to take good care of him. I'm not sure that I will have much time left to work on toMOTko for the coming months.

My prayers are with your father. Don't worry about tomotko.

For French people interested in learning German, I released an archive file containing glossaries taken from Harrap's express method. It contains lessons 1 to 9. Other lessons may be added later. It's located here on toMOTko's website in the Glossaries page.

Good news! After two months of exams and treatments, my father is feeling a lot better. He's feeling so good actually that I'm going back home next week and will resume working on toMOTko.

Just by curiosity, would there be any developer(s) ready to contribute to the project. I think that help would be very welcomed to speed up the development. Please, let me know if you're interested.

Good news indeed! About your father that is.

Unfortunately, I can't write code so I am of no help.