JLDrillUsage
From a command prompt (from Windows: Start->Programs->Accessories->Command) type:
jldrill
Note: Currently there is no easy way to make an icon on your desktop or an entry in the start menu for JLDrill. This will be added in a future release.
Note: On Un*x-like systems you will have to make sure that the gem bin directory is in your path. Debian (and Ubuntu) put this in the /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin directory, where 1.8 is the version number for ruby.
Main Window
This is what you see when you first start JLDrill.
There’s not much to do until you load a drill file.
Selecting a Drill File
You may open a drill file by clicking the “Open” button on the tool bar. You may also access this functionality by pressing Ctrl-O, or selecting File/Open from the menu bar. After doing so you will be presented with the file open dialog.
There are many drill files available. They include hiragana, katakana, JLPT vocabulary levels 1-4 and grammar. JLDrill will automatically choose the directory that contains the default drill files.
Note: Levels 1 and 2 of the JLPT files have some incorrect translations. Please cross reference the vocabulary with the dictionary to ensure that they are correct (see below). Also, the grammar drill is a work in progress and contains only about half of the material from Tae Kim’s Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar.
Conducting the Quiz
After loading the quiz file you will be presented with your first question. This will be shown in the top pane of the main window.
The first time you see an item you will be shown the kanji and reading for the word. You should try to guess what the english meaning of the word is. When you think you know, or you’ve given up, you click on “Check” (”Z” on the keyboard).
If you were right in your guess, you click on “Correct” (”C” on the keyboard). Otherwise you click on “Incorrect” (”X” on the keyboard). After replying you will be presented with a new question. In this manner you are introduced to new material.
Measuring Your Progress
The status of the quiz is displayed at the bottom of the screen. When you first load a quiz, it will look like this:
First, the * on the left hand side means that the quiz has not been saved yet. As you progress through the quiz, it keeps track of your progress. If you save the file (and hence your progress), the * will disappear.
Following the modification indicator is a count of the items in each set of the quiz. JLDrill divides the quiz into 3 sets: The New set, The Review set and the Working set.
The New Set
The new set contains all the items that you have never seen before. When you first start a quiz, all of the items are put in the new set. Then one item is chosen to be displayed to you. So in the example above, there are 672 items in the new set. Since one is being displayed, you know that there are a total of 673 items in the drill.
The Review Set
After you memorize an item, it will be placed into the review set. We have just started and no items have been memorized, so you can see that the review set contains 0 items.
The Working Set
The working set contains the items that you are currently memorizing. The maximum number of items allowed in the working set depends on the drill. Usually, it is set to 10 items, but you can adjust this number in the options. The working set is further divided into 3 levels (levels 1, 2 and 3). When you first start to learn an item, it is placed in level 1. As you learn it, it advances to the second and third level. After you master the third level, it is considered memorized and is moved into the review set. In the example above, you can see that the count is 1,0,0 which means that there is one item at level 1 and zero items at levels 2 and 3.
The next thing on the status is an indicator of the item currently being drilled. You will notice it says “1 -> 5.0 days”. The number on the left hand side indicates where the currently drilled item came from. In this case, it is a level 1 item from the working set. If it were level 2, then the number would be 2. Level 3 would be 3. Items from the review set have a ”+” in front of them. They will be described later.
After the level indicator is the potential schedule for the item. After you memorize an item, JLDrill will put it in the review set and schedule it for review sometime in the future. The potential schedule is the approximate amount of time that JLDrill will wait before showing the item to you again. While the item is in the working set, JLDrill keeps track of the number of times you successfully guessed the right answer. It uses this value to create the potential schedule. The value displayed is the scheduled amount of time that will be used if you continue to guess the item correctly until it is memorized. More will be said about this later.
Finally there is an indicator showing whether or not JLDrill is in “review mode” or “new item mode”. Since we have just started, JLDrill will select items to put into the working set from the new set, rather than the review set. It displays “New Items” to indicate this. More detail on “review mode” and “new item mode” will be discussed later.
Learning and Reviewing
JLDrill’s strategy for introducing items into the quiz is at the same time complicated to describe and easy to use. If you want to understand the nitty gritty details, along with a rationale for the choices made, please see the strategy documentation. But for those who just want to use the program, a brief description of what is going on, follows.
As has been mentioned, when you first start a drill, all items are put into the new set. Then one item is selected (either the first item in the drill, or at random according to the options set) to be quized. This item is placed into level 1 of the working set. Once you quiz the item and select either “correct” or “incorrect”, a new item is selected from the new set and placed into level 1 of the working set. This continues until the working set is full.
The size of the working set is dependent upon the drill, but by default it is 10 items. You can see that every time a new item is introduced, the number of items in level 1 in the working set increases.
Here you can see that the working set has 10 items in level 1.
At this point, JLDrill will stop adding new items to the working set. Instead, it will randomly select an item from the working set for you to try again. You can think of the working set like a deck of cards. It draws one card and then presents it to you. Then it draws another card. Once all 10 items in the working set have been presented, it reshuffles the deck and starts again.
Note: Occasionally after the working set has been shuffled it will present the same item it just presented, showing the same item twice in a row. This is unfortunate. A release in the future will correct this behaviour.
Going to the Next Level
If you get an item correct two times in a row, it will be promoted to the next level. The second time you get the item correct, you will notice that the number of level 2 items will increase and the number of level 1 items will decrease.
Here you can see that there are now 9 items at level 1 in the working set and 1 item at level 2.
The next item you get to this item you will notice something different.
In the top pane (the question pane), you will notice that the quiz now only shows you the kanji. You must now remember the meaning and the reading for the item. What happens if you get this one wrong now?
Every time you get an item wrong, it is demoted back to level 1. Also, the potential schedule for the item is reduced. This is what the item looks like after we’ve gotten it wrong and drill it again.
Here you can see we’ve drilled all the other items and gotten back to our demoted item. From the “1 –> 4.2 days” in the status bar, you can see that it is again a level 1 item and that the potential schedule is now 4.2 days rather than 5.0 days. Each time you get an item incorrect, the potential schedule will decrease.
Eventually we will start to get our item correct as we learn it. When it is correct twice in a row, it will be promoted to level 2. When it is correct twice more from there, it will be promoted to level 3 (i.e., it has been guessed 4 times in a row correctly). The quiz then looks like this.
You will notice that the question pane has the english meaning now. The answer pane has the kanji and the reading. You should be able to say the Japanese word for the item. You should also know what kanji it is using. Finally, notice that the Status bar now contains “3 –> 4.2 days.” indicating that this item is level 3 and it has a potential schedule of 4.2 days.
When you have gotten a level 3 item correct 2 times in a row, it will be considered “memorized”. At this point it will be promoted to the review set. How it is treated in the review set will be discussed below, but having been promoted it leaves a spot in the working set. This spot will be filled by an item from the new set, unless you are in review mode (see below).
In this way, you review items over and over again until they are memorized. When you memorize one item in the working set, it is replaced by a new item from the new set. Slowly, over time, you will eventually memorize all the items from the new set.
Review Mode
Once an item has been memorized in the working set, it is promoted to the review set. Unlike the working set, the review set items have a definite order. They are ordered by the “potential schedule” that the item has when it is promoted.
For example, the item that we were discussing previously has a potential schedule of 4.2 days. When it is promoted into the review set it will be inserted into the set according to this schedule. In other words, it will be placed after items with a potential schedule of 3 days, and before items with a potential schedule of 5 days for instance.
Over time, the potential schedule decreases. So if we put an item in the review set with a potential schedule of 4.2 days, after waiting one day it will have a potential schedule of 3.2 days. If the item remains in the review set for a long time, it can even have a potential schedule below zero. This means you are “behind” on this item. More about this will be discussed later.
Items in the review set are displayed when you are in “review mode”. You automatically enter review mode when you first start the application. At any other time, you can enter review mode by pressing the “Review Mode” button at the top right of the window.
Note: The application won’t enter review mode unless you have at least the same number of items in the review set as you do in the working set (default 10). That’s why you don’t enter review mode the first time you start a quiz.
When the application is in review mode it continues to operate normally. You are continually tested on items from the working set. However, when an item from the working set is promoted into the review set it leaves a gap in the working set. In review mode, this gap is filled by an item from the review set.
In this picture the item has been promoted into the review set. Then we quit the application and restarted it later in the day. As you can see from the status line we have 10 items in the review set, so the application automatically entered review mode. Eventually it displayed this item.
Inspecting the status line, you can see that part of it has changed. It now reads “+1, Today –> 4.2 days” where the level and potential schedule were displayed previously. In this case, “+1” refers to the number of times this item has been reviewed in review mode. This is the first time, so it is level 1. Every time we get the item right in a row, the level increases.
“Today” refers to the last time this item was reviewed. In reality, I just quit the application and restarted it, so the last time we reviewed the item was today. If we reviewed it last yesterday, it would say “Yesterday”, otherwise it just prints the date. Finally we can see the potential schedule if we get the item correct.
Before I make a discussion of scheduling, I would like to discuss the last item on the status line. It says “50%”. When you are in review mode, the application keeps track of the percentage of items you got right in the last 10 attempts. Unbeknownst to you, I reviewed a few items before this one and got 50 percent of them right.
The percentage is a guide to show you when review mode will end. If you can maintain a success rate of 90% in the last 10 attempts, the program will go into “countdown mode”. In this mode, if you manage to keep your success rate at 90% or above for 9 more items, then review mode will end and you will go back to “new items” mode.
You can tell when you are in countdown mode because the percentage will look something like “90% - 5”, meaning that you have answered 90% of the last 10 questions correctly and that you have 5 more questions before review mode ends.
The system will continue asking you questions from the review set until you get one wrong, or review mode ends. If you get one wrong, it is placed into the gap in the working set and quizzing resumes as normal. If the review mode ends, then the system goes into new item mode and a new item is selected for the gap.
Scheduling
In most spaced repetion applications, each item has a fixed date when it is scheduled to be reviewed. When that date has passed, the item is reviewed. JLDrill doesn’t work like that.
Instead it has a “potential schedule”. The items are then sorted by the potential schedule. You then review items until you seem to be getting at least 90% of them correct. The reason for this is simple.
When the items are scheduled, JLDrill puts alot of effort to ensure that the items you are most likely to forget are placed at the front of the list. Items that you are least likely to forget are placed at the back. As you review, you will notice that your rate of success gets better and better. Once your rate of success is 90% or more, then there is little point to reviewing any more. We will be better off to learn new items at this point.
While you are in review mode, when you get an item correct, it is given a potential schedule of twice the amount of time since the last review. For example, if we haven’t reviewed the item for 2 days and then get the item correct, it will be given a potential schedule of 4 days. In this way the gap between successful reviews will get longer and longer.
But it’s important to realize that the “potential schedule” is not the actual time that it will be reviewed. It just represents the order in which the items are sorted. When you actually review the item will depend on how well you remember the items. When you get to 90% correct, you stop reviewing.
In other words, JLDrill automatically adjusts the scheduling for you. If you have difficulty remembering items, then they will show up more often. If you remember them easily, then they will appear less often. I believe this is a significant advantage over other spaced repetition algorithms.
However, you may have noticed that the item we reviewed today started with a potential schedule of 4.2 days, and after we successfully reviewed it once, still had a schedule of 4.2 days. I had only just promoted it a few minutes ago, so the total schedule should have been twice that – or only minutes.
In reality, it actually does. What happened was that the item was scheduled for 4.2 potential days. But I reviewed all the items for those 4.2 days in just a couple of minutes. So the program adjusts for this and creates the new scheduled date from the old scheduled date. In this case, we have a few minutes plus 4.2 days, which ends up being about 4.2 days (once the numbers are rounded off).
Note: Probably I should scale the schedule. In other words, I should keep track of the scheduled time vs the actual time and scale the new schedule accordingly. I may do that in a future release.
All this talk of scheduling may be confusing. If you don’t understand, don’t worry about it. The only important point is that the program is designed to keep your items roughly in order of the chance you have of forgetting them. When you know all the items in the list with 90% chance of success, it gives you new items.
There is a caveat, which again is mostly unimportant, but possibly interesting if you want to understand what’s going on. If you successfully review an item in the review set, it won’t be shown again that session. If you quit the application and start again, you might see it if the potential schedule is small enough.
Getting Behind
Here you can see a situation that happens from time to time. In the status bar, beside the working set information you can see the words “Behind: 577”. When an item has a potential schedule of less than 0 (i.e., it sat in the review set without being reviewed for longer than it’s original schedule), then it is known as being “behind”.
In this case, I’m behind by 577 items. You will definitely be behind from time to time. The algorithm is designed to adjust for your speed, so occasionally you will find that some items will get behind naturally. Or sometimes you take a couple of days off and the items have gotten behind.
As long as you can review all the items in a day or so, it doesn’t create much difficulty. In order to help yourself out, you can go into review mode by pushing the button in the top right corner. This will stop the program from ever going into new items mode even if you get every item correct. This is a good way to clear out a backlog.
But in my sad case, I’m just not going to be able to review 577 items in a reasonable timeframe. There are multiple problems with this. First, the algorithm is designed to keep things in rough order in the schedule. But when items get behind they slowly go out of order. Because you will forget items at different rates, you can no longer rely on statistics to tell you when to stop reviewing.
But the next problem is worse. If you have several days of items that are behind, it will take you several days to get to the back of the list. Items are only scheduled in the future, so it will take several days before you re-review items. At this point you may have forgotten them. You can easily get into a state where your success rate is low enough that you can no longer learn anything new – you will be spinning your wheels just trying to keep up with the backlog.
So, if at all possible, review your items every day – in fact, review them several times a day if you can. Short frequent sessions are better than long sessions every once in a while. However, you should always aim to get out of review mode each time you run the application. That way you will not fall behind.
But if you get behind like I have, you have no choice. You will have to reset the drill (Drill->Reset, or press Ctrl-R) and start again.
Note: In a future release there will be a way to “forget” items that are behind. This will put them back in the new list.
Options
If you press Ctrl-P or select Quiz/Preferences from the menu, you can alter a few options for the quiz.
Right now only a few things are available to be changed. The first is whether or not items from the new set are introduced randomly. If you check the box, they will be. If the box is unchecked, the items will be introduced in the order they appear in the file.
The next slider allows you to set the number of times an item must be guessed correctly before it is promoted to the next level. I have found settings of 1 and 2 to be most useful. For grammar, it is set to 1 because you don’t really want to memorize the item, just practice it. Setting this value to 3 or higher might be useful if you are having a really difficult time remembering things in the working set.
However, another thing you can do is alter the number of items in the working set. This is controlled by the next slider. Usually this is set to 10, but you can change it to whatever you like. The more items you have in the working set, the longer it will take between reviews of the item. If the material is quite easy for you, you might want to make this large. If it is very difficult, you can make the value small.
The last slider sets the quiz strategy version. This is not used at all and will be removed soon.
Saving Your Progress
Remember to save your drill before you quit. That way it will pick up where you left off last time. The first time you load a drill, you might want to use the “Save As” entry from the menu bar (File/Save As, or Ctrl-A) to save your drill under a different name. This will allow you to keep the original file unchanged.
At any time you can save the current file (using File/Save from the menu, Ctrl-S, or clicking on the Toolbar). If you quit the application, or open up another drill, JLDrill will always ask you if you want to save your file.
Indicators
Above the top panel in the drill is a bank of indicators.
Drills derived from edict entries have markers. These indicators will light up when the word has a specific marker. In the example, the word is a “suru noun”. The markers that JLDrill has indicators for are:
Usually Kana
The item is usually written with kana rather than kanji. In most of the drills I have kept the kanji. If you don’t want to drill them, you can edit the item and remove the kanji. Personally, I find it useful to memorize words from the kanji, so I’ve left it in. A future version of JLDrill will have an option to avoid drilling the kanji for items that are usually kana.
Humble
The item is part of humble keigo. This means that in polite speach you will use this word when referring to yourself or your circle (family, company, etc).
Honourific
The item is is part of honourific keigo. This means that in polite speech you will use this word when referring to people outside your circle (your boss, people you are talking to, etc).
Polite
The item is used in polite speech. It’s neither humble nor honourific, but used in polite situations.
Suru Noun
This noun can be made into a verb by putting “suru” (する) at the end of it.
Intransitive
This verb does not take a direct object. That is you can’t use wo (を) with it. If this item is not lit up, usually you can assume that the verb is transitive, but the whole transitive/intransitive thing in Edict is still a little shakey. It is always best to look at usage examples.
Differs
This item was not found in the reference dictionary. This only lights up when the reference dictionary is loaded.
Note: In the future you will be able to select which markers you want indicators for.
Kanji/Kana Popup Information
JLDrill has a handy popup reference for kanji and kana characters. You can load it by pressing Ctrl-K.
Note: This feature should probably be loaded automatically. It doesn’t take long. I was worried that people with disabilities might get annoyed by the popups, though. If nobody complains before the next release I will make this automatic.
After you press Ctrl-K, whenever you hover over a kanji or Kana character you will get information for that character.
Here you can see an example of a kanji character. Although you can’t see it in the picture, the mouse is hovering over the character on the right.
In the left hand side of the window you can see the stroke order information for the character. You draw the stroke labeled “1” first. The numbers are positioned next to the end of the line where you start drawing.
In the right hand side of the window there is a lot of information. First is a list of all the readings for that character. In practice they are all there, although I’ve found some strange readings that are missing. Underneath the readings are a list of english meanings for the character.
Underneath that is the grade that the character would be learned in a Japanese school, and the number of strokes for the character.
Finally there is a list of all the radicals for the character, the Japanese name for the character and the english meaning of each radical. The official bushu is the first radical in the list and is anotated with a *.
If you hover over a kana character you will only see something like this:
Note: Sorry for the change in appearance. I changed my desktop and I don’t feel like redoing all the pictures. For the 1.0 release I’ll have a consistent look to all the pictures.
On the left you can see the stroke order diagram. On the right you will see the character followed by the official representation in roman characters. In this example the character is the katakana ス which is represented by the roman characters “su”.
Because the pronunciation of the character is not always intuitive from the roman characters, I have included my own inerpretation of the sound. In this case it is “soo”. I have also included a few English words that contain the same sound – super and soothe. Please note that I am a Canadian with a Canadian English accent. While I have tried to choose words that correspond with most accents I know of, the sounds might be wrong for your English accent. In a future release I will provide recordings of all the sounds spoken by a native Japanese speaker.
Note: The stroke order diagram is only shown if you install the stroke order font. Please see the installation instructions for more information.
Note: In the future I want to improve these popups dramatically.
Statistics
JLDrill keeps track of some statistics to help you understand how you are doing. In truth, most of these statistics are used to help me understand if the scheduling algorithm is working properly. But you may also find them interesting.
You can obtain the statistics by pressing Alt-S, or by selecting Drill->Statistics from the menu.
Note: Here is another really unfinished feature. It is UGLY. Please send me suggestions for what you want to see and how you want to see it.
The statistics window is split into 4 sections of 2 columns each. The first section shows the number of items that are potentially scheduled for this week. In the example you can see that I have 576 item that are overdue (behind). I have 60 scheduled for today, 44 scheduled for tomorrow, etc. Note this this is the potential schedule. What I actually review depends on how well I remember the items.
This part of the statistics window is useful for seeing whether you are going faster or slower than the algorithm predicts. Normally I find myself fluctuating between my new items starting a little bit overdue, to a few days ahead. Since the algorithm is self-correcting this is normal. Probably the information itself isn’t really useful, but I was always curious, so I put it in.
The next two columns show the distribution of items in the review set. This is actually useful. You can see that I have 279 items that were scheduled within 5 days, 0 items scheduled between 5 and 10 days, 45 scheduled between 10 and 20 days. Note that this is when they were originally scheduled, not what their potential schedule is now.
This is useful to show yourself whether or not you are progressing properly. Overtime, the schedule for the items will increase. But you can see here that I have a lot of items in the lowest band and no items in the next band. That’s because when I was reviewing them I got them all wrong. If you find strange things like this, then it means you aren’t learning. In my case it’s because I didn’t review for a few weeks and couldn’t recover. When bad things like this happen, reset your drill and start from scratch.
The next three columns show the percentage of times you got items correct at each level in the review set and the number of items you’ve been quizzed on. It does this for only the current session. When you quit the application and start again, this will start fressh.
In order to create a screenshot, I just raced through a few items. You can see that I reviewed 26 level 1 items and got 80% of them correct. Level 1 means that these are items I have only reviewed one time in the review set. I reviewed 9 items in level 3 (they have been successfully reviewed 3 times in a row), and 3 items in level 4. All of these (100%) were correct.
This part of the statistics is useful to see how the algorithm is working. Generally speaking you will usually have less success with lower level items (since you forget them faster). This is just an interesting way to see how it’s going. Note that you shouldn’t be particularly worried about these number unless you review more than 30 in a group and you get a very low success rate. If you do, perhaps there’s a problem somewhere.
Finally the last two columns show some rndom statistics. The first line shows you the total number of items you have reviewed this session in the review set. Then next number shows the total number of items that have been promoted into the review set this session (i.e., items you have learned or memorized). In this example I have reviewed 38 items and learned 6.
The next two lines tell you how much time (per item) was spend reviewing or learning, on average. In my case I spent 0.8 seconds per item reviewing. Usually this number is about 10 or 12 seconds for me. As I said, I was just racing around to get a screen shot. I spend 2.8 seconds per item learning items. This means the total amount of time it took from the time it was introduced until the time it was learned. Normally it takes me about 90 seconds to learn an item (on good days it’s more like 60 and on days when I’m tired it can be over 120 seconds).
Note that these times are averages. The Time to Learn, especially, will start out very high because it takes a long time to get the first item learned. But over time it will stabalize on the correct average.
The next line, total accuracy tells you your accuracy for the review set only. In this case, I got 86% of the review set items that I was drill correct this session.
The final line is simply the percentage of time it takes to learn versus review. Probably this is not interesting to you, but at one point I was thinking it was significant for the algorithm (I’ve changed my mind now).
Non-Drill Features
Reference Dictionary. This feature is useful in case you want to check that the translation in the drill is correct. It allows you to cross reference the word against a dictionary and edit it if necessary.
Note: The JLPT files are known to have some inappropriate or incorrect translations. I have corrected the words in the JLPT4 and JLPT3 files, but am only a third of the way through the JLPT2 files. This is very much a work in progress. When working with words you haven’t checked, please load the reference dictionary.
You can load a reference dictionary by pressing Ctrl-D (or selecting File/Load Reference Dictionary from the menu) The reference dictionary distributed with JLDrill is the EDICT dictionary from Monash University. Note that it takes a long time (25 seconds on my machine) to load the edict library. A window with a progress bar will be shown. You are able to continue drilling while the dictionary is loading, though.
After the Reference Dictionary has been loaded, JLDrill will look up every item as you encounter it. If the item can not be found in the dictionary, the “Differs” indicator in the upper right will be highlighted.
Edit item. Pressing E (or selecting Vocab/Edit from the menu) will allow you to edit the current item.
In this mode you can modify any of the fields.
If the dictionary has been loaded you will also see a list of words from the dictionary that start with the characters in the reading. Clicking on one of them will copy its information into the field.
When you are done, press the Set button and the item will be changed in the drill. This will also close the Edit window. If you wish to close the window without setting the item, simply press the close button in the top right of the window.
Sometimes you will edit an item but realize that you haven’t loaded the dictionary. You can load the dictionary from the main window without closing the search window. When it is finished loading, you can press the “Search” button to update the list of items.
Note: If you continue with the quiz without closing the Edit window, it will update itself with the new items as you get them. Be careful though because if you have edited the data without pressing the “Set” button, the information will be overwritten.
Note: The workflow and layout of this window are really poor. I hope to improve it over time. If you have suggestions, please contact me.
Add item. Pressing “A” (or selecting Vocab/Add from the menu) will allow you to add a new item to the drill. It adds it to the end of the new set. This feature works exactly the same as the Edit feature except that there is an “Add” button rather than a “Set” button.
When you first start adding an item the window is empty.
You can edit the fields as you desire. If you have loaded the dictionary you can also search for items by pressing the “Search” button. This works by searching for the reading only.
You can then simply click on the item that you want and it will copy itself into the fields. When you click “Add” the item will be added to the quiz at the end of the New Set.
When you press add, the Add window will not close. This is so that you can add several items. To close the window, press the close box in the upper right corner of the window.
Note: The advantage to having the Add the same as the Edit is that they are the same. The disadvantage is that they both suck equally badly. Please send me suggestions for improvement.
Show all. Will show a table of all the words in the drill.
Reset. You can reset the drill so that all the words are Unseen again. Press Ctrl-R or select Drill/Reset from the menu to do this.
Info. Show information about the current drill. This is just information that the drill author wants to show. It might contain copyright information or other interesting things. Pressing Ctrl-I or selecting Drill/Info from the menu will display this dialog.
Create a New Drill. There are two ways you can create a new drill. The first is by starting up JLDrill and using the Add feature (press “A” or select Vocab/Add from the menu). Unfortunately there is currently no way to rearrange or delete items.
You can also create a new drill by importing any UTF8 encoded EDict file. Just open the file (JLDrill will automatically recognize the file type) and then save it to another name. Going up one directory from the quizes, you will find a director called “dict”. In this directory you will find the files that generated the drill. Additionally you will find the Mainichi Shinbun Frequency files. Finally you will also find the whole edict.utf file in case you want to drill yourself on all 120,000 words in the dictionary.
Merging Two Drills. You can merge two drills by loading one of them and the appending the other using the File->Append menu item or pressing Ctrl-P. The files can either be JLDrill files or UTF8 encoded EDict files. If the files are JLDrill files, the status of the items will be preserved. The items in the second file will be add after items in the first file. Also items in the second file that duplicate items in the first file will be discard without warning.
Notes: This operation takes a very long time and there is no feedback showing your status. Please be patient. Also if you save the resultant drill it will be saved under the first filename. If you want to save it to another filename please make sure to use Save As.
This feature was a quick and dirty implementation for something I needed one time. Please give me feedback as to whether you find it useful or not. I may remove it if nobody needs it.
That’s it. Hope you find it useful. Please see the Planned Features page to see what’s coming up next.
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