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 language. Current features include a kana drill, a vocabulary drill, a dictionary cross reference tool and a popup-kanji reference with stroke order diagrams.

Screenshot

What’s New for 0.3.0

Version 0.3.0 introduces a long-term spaced repetition scheduling algorithm. It is one of my own devising and still needs a bit of teaking. However, even at this early stage I find it is working very well.

Version 0.3.0 also offers numerous user interface improvements. There is an indicator box that shows several of the useful Edict markers for each vocabulary. A new option for adding vocabulary allows you to add new entries to a quiz (or even build a quiz from scratch). The display of the questions has been improved using larger fonts for the kanji. Finally, if you load the kanji dictionary, you can hover over a kanji character and get a rikaichan-like popup showing useful information about that character.

JLDrill is now Beta

I now 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 months 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 desiger, so I welcome any and all advice on this front.

News

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 embarrasingly 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

© 2005-2008 Mike Charlton | Generated by webgen | Design by Andreas Viklund modified by Mike Charlton.