Acknowledgements

This program could not have been written if it were not for the contribution that others have made. Normally JLDrill will be distributed with data files that are used for creating the drills. These data files required an enormous amount of work to compile and their authors deserve to be given some credit.

In particular I want to thank The Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group at Monash University. JLDrill uses the EDICT files for it’s reference dictionary. Without this monumental work, very little could be done in the world of free software with respect to Japanese language training. I am deeply in their debt.

I would also like to thank Thierry Bézecourt for the use of the files which form the basis of the JLPT drills. Thierry has very kindly granted permission to use these files in this application under the GPL license, thus saving me weeks of work.

The emerging grammar quiz is based on the excellent Japanese grammar primer by Tae Kim. This is a really fantastic aid to anyone learning Japanese. In fact, I believe it significantly surpasses anything else written for beginner/intermediate learners. Tae Kim has also made a really strong stance for free culture by releasing his work under a Creative Commons license and actively encourages others to do so. It is his actions that allow me to even consider creating a grammar drill.

Tim Eyre created the KanjiStrokeOrders font. This fills a big gap in learning Japanese. I had literally spent tens of hours trying to figure out how to represent this information when I stumbled upon this gem. Being able to use this font allowed me to implement one of the coolest features of JLDrill in only about an hour.

I would also like to thank polarcloud.com for writing and releasing the firefox plugin, rikaichan, under the GPL. I have used many of their data files and used the same verb deinflection algorithm as rikaichan. This was a really groundbreaking piece of software and being able to study it and use it in my project is a testament to how free software should work. If you have the ability, I would appreciate if you go to their website and donate some money to them.: rikaichan

Finally, I would like to thank some people for indirectly contributing to the project. I really appreciate RubyForge for hosting this project. It makes a big difference. Also I want to thank the Ottawa Coding Dojo for their support while I worked on JLDrill. And last but not least, I wish to thank Sagara High School for employing me and giving me enough free time to work on JLDrill.

Notes

The EDICT files are the property of the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group at Monash University, and are used in conformance with the Group’s licence.

Links:

Please visit Thierry’s Website

The Grammar file was constructed using Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Japanese grammar. That guide is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license (2.5). It additionally includes vocabulary from EDICT.

Please visit Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar

The stroke order information in the popup is provided by the KanjiStrokeOrder font:

This font is distributed under a BSD license.

The datafiles from rikaichan have been released under the GPL.

More licence information can be found in the data/jldrill/COPYING directory in JLDrill’s main distribution.

JLDrill

Japanese Language Drill Program

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Acknowledgements

Notes

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