JLDrill

Japanese Language Drill Program

Links:

• Mike Charlton's Homepage

Welcome to JLDrill

JLDrill is a program for helping people drill various aspects of the Japanese and Chinese languages. Current features include a kana drill, a vocabulary drill, a dictionary cross reference tool, a popup reference with stroke order diagrams for kanji and traditional chinese characters, example sentences from the Tatoeba database and the ability to do dictionary lookups (with deinflection in Japanese) by hovering the mouse over a word in the quiz or examples.

NEW IN 0.6.0! Mandarin language support using the CC-CEdict dictionary and Tatoeba example sentences. The popup kanji tool will display readings for Mandarin Chinese. Unfortunately, the stroke order font only supports tranditional characters.

The current version is 0.6.0.

Screenshots

What’s New for 0.6.0

As seen above, the big feature for 0.6.0 is support for drilling Mandarin Chinese. Both traditional and simplified characters are supported in the dictionary tool, but unfortunately the kanji popup mostly only supports traditional characters (if you search for a simplified character, it will give the the radical information for the traditional equivalent). The stroke order font also only supports traditional characters (if you know of a similar font for simplified characters, please contact me).

The other big feature for this release is Ruby 1.9 support. As far as I know, it will work on any 1.9 version supported by ruby-gtk.

I have also transitioned away from the Tanaka corpus as the source of example sentences. The project is now maintained by the Tatoeba project and since I needed to use Tatoeba for Chinese example sentences, it was a good time to switch. There is no loss of functionality, but because the database contains a lot more information, loading is slower. In the next release I will try to rectify that problem.

The statistics window has been given a new tab for forgotten items. If you are used to getting behind (like me), you might appreciate it. Basically, the statistics in the forgotten tab work just like the statistics for items in the review set, but for forgotten items.

One last major issue is the introduction of a folder for containing your own personal dictionaries and such. If you create a folder called “.jldrill” in your home directory and put a file structure the same as the distributed data directory (.jldrill/quiz for your drill files, .jldrill/dict for dictionary files, etc), you can overload the installed versions. This is useful for having your drill files show up right away when opening a file, for example. It is also especially useful for overriding the very old edict dictionary that is distributed with Debian based distributions (just put a newer version of edict in .jldrill/dict).

JLDrill is Beta Software

I consider JLDrill to be in beta. Most of the important features are present. There may still be bugs, but I have been using the software myself for several years and I think I’ve gotten rid of most of the big problems. Please be considerate of the beta status, though. Keep your eyes open for problems and report them. Poor usability issues are especially welcome. Usability problem reports should describe the difficult work flow and give a suggestion for a new work flow that will improve the problem. I am a programmer, not a UI designer, so I welcome any and all advice on this front.

News

Friday, January 26 2012

• Release 0.6.0. Wow! Almost a year between releases! Sorry about that. I have been working on other projects in the meantime. But it was time to give JLDrill a little bit of love.

Monday, May 23 2011

• Release 0.5.1

Wednesday, March 9 2011

• Getting ready for the 0.5.1 release.

Monday, January 17 2011

• I spent far more time than I expected getting this version out. My apologies. While I am reasonably consistent writing code, I am less consistent releasing versions. I have made some process changes and have enlisted some help. More news soon!

Thursday, August 26 2010.

• Development version 0.4.1 released. To be honest I haven’t gotten around to putting up 0.4.0 anywhere, so nobody has tried it. But the new development release makes some drastic changes to the scheduler. It also allows you to choose what kind of problems you want to be drilled with. Finally, it reviews problems types independently (for example, Meaning and Kanji problems are both scheduled for review for each item). Sorry for the slow releases. I have been putting more time in on studying and less on programming.

Friday, March 15 2010

• Version 0.4.0 released. I didn’t finish the features I planned to, but sometimes you just have to draw a line in the sand and release. Especially since it’s been more than a year since the previous release.

Thursday, October 8 2009.

• Because I kept fiddling with the code I’m making a 0.3.5 development version. Really, I should have released 0.4.0, but I’m too lazy. This version simplifies the user’s view of scheduling. It also dispenses with the concept of getting “behind”.

Friday, April 3 2009.

• Development version 0.3.4 released. This is the release candidate. If I don’t find any major problems, this will become 0.4.0. For a variety of reasons it actually focuses on speed, a new dictionary and the ability to create and edit new drills. Packaging has been pushed back (again).

Thursday, Dec 25 2008.

• Development version 0.3.3 released. In case you thought you didn’t see the other versions, don’t worry. They didn’t actually make it on to the server. Distributed source management is great if you actually remember to do a push once in a while…

Friday, Dec 19 2008.

• Development version 0.3.2 released.

Saturday, Dec 13 2008.

• Added links to the download page to make installation easier. Added a page on Development which links to my bzr repositories since I no longer keep the source on Rubyforge.

Tuesday, Dec 9 2008.

• Release day for 0.3.0. It’s taken much longer than I expected to get to this point. In fact, there’s been a freeze for the most part since September, but I haven’t even been able to find time to update the web page. But now going into winter break I should have some time.

Friday, Aug 29 2008.

• JLDrill has been under constant development since the last update. But I haven’t been updating the site. The reason is that I’ve taken the opportunity to rework the entire code structure. There are still plenty of places with embarrassingly bad code, but the new structure is there. Hopefully updates will be more frequent

Sunday, Nov 11 2007.

• Added some significant improvements to the CVS version. If you load the dictionary it now warns you if the current item is not in the dictionary. It also displays some of the EDict language part indicators. Finally, the parsing of Edict files has been substantially improved. It now parses tags correctly almost all the time.

Friday, Nov 2 2007.

• お久しぶりね. What happened here? No updates for 2 years. Well, as it turns out, I wasn’t happy with the scheduling algorithm. At the time I was just starting to learn about spaced repetition and I didn’t know how to implement it. In the end I started using Mnemosyne for my daily review. It took me 2 years to figure out what I wanted to do. Now I’m ready to make some significant changes.

Tuesday, Jan 29 2006.

• New CVS update. This is a performance improvement for reading the edict dictionary. It should load 2-3x faster now. Version 0.2.0 is a little late (been studying Japanese too much ;-) ). Expect it in the next week or two.

Monday, Dec 19 2005.

• Updated the usage instructions for Windows to better reflect how to start the application. If you were having troubles before, see the Usage page.

Saturday, Dec 17 2005.

• Version 0.1.0 is released! This is the first public release of JLDrill.

Friday, Dec 16 2005.

• Lots of updates. All functionality required for the first alpha release is completed. Just need to finish the documentation. Hopefully it will all be done tonight.

Monday, Dec 5 2005.

• New look web page thanks to “Webgen” Yes, it’s still ugly (that’s not Webgen’s fault…). I thought I’d get cute with the colours, and well… graphic designer I am not.

• New icon for JLDrill (look to the left of the title) Umm… see the point above about me not being a graphic designer? If you want to help and you don’t know how to program, here’s your chance! I’ve done the basics, please make it not ugly.

site info

© 2005-2011 Mike Charlton | Generated by webgen | Design by Andreas Viklund modified by Mike Charlton.