I've decided to learn Japanese and I'm now on my 5th week of the course. The amount of material coming my way is quite large (especially the vocabulary) so I was thinking about how I could get Perl to help me learn characters and pick up vocabulary.

What I want is to have this tool easily extendable as I learn more. For example, to begin with we are learning words using Romaji spelling. So simple word matching should be easy. However, we are also learning hiragana (and no doubt will soon learn katakana) so I want to be able to extend/switch to unicode matching at a future point.

I have an idea of an application written in Perl/Tk with a virtual keyboard and some kind of gui screen that presents a question and echos my answer.

Trouble is, I know virtually nothing about Tk. Additionally, I am not sure how I would enter the hiragana (etc) except via a *fake* keyboard window that has the characters that I can click on.

Does this sound correct? Could I just use Unicode on a Win2K system and have the Perl/Tk do the right thing? Ideally I'd like this to be portable to other platforms so relying on an ime from Microsoft isn't ideal. I also don't fancy having to learn raw unicode ;).

I had considered a web application but I think the opportunnity to learn perl/tk to be quite a good one.

Any thoughts, resources, book links that you think may be of use would be gratefully accepted!

TTFN,

SP

In reply to RFC: Japanese Language Quiz Program by simon.proctor

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.