theYinYeti Posted November 10, 2008 Report Share Posted November 10, 2008 (edited) Hi, I've started to learn Japanese yesterday. While I still want to keep my French Dvorak keyboard for everyday use, I'd like to be able to enter Japanese text in any application, and I'd be glad to get help from some learning software. So here I am, asking for advice for the right configuration, and maybe some helpful tools. So far, I installed all japanese-related fonts I could find with urpmi, and downloaded and installed Anki, along with the Hiragana+Katakana lesson. I'm rather pleased with it, although I think I'll find it a bit limited after a month or two… On the input front, I installed scim-honoka and im-ja; I find the former average, and the latter unusable, but maybe neither is set up right, as few of the configuration option mean anything to me. What I would like is being able to “draw†the kanji or hiragana instead of typing roumanji… Yves. Edited November 24, 2008 by theYinYeti Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted November 12, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 12, 2008 I forgot to tell something. I have a problem with SCIM, the way it currently works. With most (but not all) Gnome applications, I can right-click any editable area, switch the input method from “System†to “SCIM†and then start typing roumanji, that gets converted on-the-fly to hiragana/kanji. However, with some other Gtk applications (Geany…), and in Firefox, and for all KDE/Qt applications, SCIM seems to be unavailable! Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soka Posted November 12, 2008 Report Share Posted November 12, 2008 Hi, Yves. I´m currently using gentoo but I think the same packages should be available in mandriva. For the input method I´m using uim with scim-anthy as frontend. For it to work in qt apps you will also need to install scim-qtimm and scim-bridge for qt4 apps. Also don´t forget to set the environmental variables so that you can switch input methods by simply pressing ctrl + spacebar. Just add the following to your .xprofile, xsession, xinitrc or similar file. export XMODIFIERS=@im=SCIM export GTK_IM_MODULE=scim export QT_IM_MODULE=scim Anki is a great app, you will find it very useful once you start learning kanjis. Other app you might be interested in is the Rikaichan extension for Firefox. It let´s you get the kanji reading and meaning by hovering the mouse over it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted November 12, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 12, 2008 Thank you Soka! I'll follow your instructions. I just hope it won't break my French keyboard; indeed, the Dvorak wiki instructed to put that in .bashrc: export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim I'll try and see… I know how to repair things if needed :) I'll try Rikaichan too. Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted November 13, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 13, 2008 (edited) All is working perfectly! ç§ã¯æ—¥æœ¬ã®è¨€èªžã‚’å¦ã¶ã€‚ And Rikaichan is nice too. Thank you again! I don't have the slightest understanding of Anthy's configuration options, but it seems to me that “direct input†(draw kana and kanji with the mouse = sign recognition) is not one of them. Do you know if that is possible? It would be great for learning to write correctly. Meanwhile, I'll keep learning with Anki. Yves. Edited November 13, 2008 by theYinYeti Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted November 14, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 14, 2008 While I still appreciate the help received, I spoke too fast about the fore-mentionned total success. Actually, all is working fine… except Anki! That's ironic, to say the least. Now that I installed scim-anthy, scim-bridge-gtk, and scim-bridge-qt4, without any other change (except the .bashrc), running Anki gives: [yves@localhost ~]$ anki Fatal Python error: (pygame parachute) Segmentation Fault Abandon I tried removing pygame, as it is optional for Anki, but I still get: [yves@localhost ~]$ anki Segmentation Fault On the other hand, this failure is only for me. I created a test user, and this user (who does not have the modified .bashrc) can run Anki… Any idea what could be wrong, and how I could trick Anki into believing all is still as it was before? Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soka Posted November 14, 2008 Report Share Posted November 14, 2008 I don´t think it´s possible to use sign recognition in Anthy. You can see here if you want to try a kanji handwritten recognition applet. Regarding anki I´m not having any problem with it when having scim enabled but you can try disabling it for anki. In a console write the following: QT_IM_MODULE=simple anki If it works, make it a script. Create a text file as the following and make it executable. #!/bin/bash QT_IM_MODULE=simple anki Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted November 14, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 14, 2008 No luck. — From the lines you gave to me for IM initialisation, I only kept GTK_IM_MODULE, as this one seems enough for Firefox and Geany. Not for OpenOffice though; I'll probably have to put the XMODIFIERS line back, now that my tests are done. — I rebooted the PC. — I removed from my home directory any file related to Anki, basically: ~/.anki and ~/tmp/anki*. Still the same error. Well, I'll try and find an alternative to Anki (preferably Gtk-based). Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted November 17, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 17, 2008 I settled for Mnemosyne. It seems not as good as Anki, and so far, scim doesn't work with it, but overall, I like it. Besides, I like how easy it is to add your own cards. Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adamw Posted November 17, 2008 Report Share Posted November 17, 2008 Instead of bothering to learn kanji, my cunning master plan is to wait forty years or so, at which point no Japanese people will understand the damn things either. =) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted November 18, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 18, 2008 :lol: Actually, I'm starting to think that Mnemosyne is maybe better than Anki, after all. Its scheduling method adapts more to your (free) time, and it is easier to use in my opinion. As for scim, I think I may just have to install scim-bridge-qt3 to have it working (so far, I only installed scim-bridge-qt4 for Qt). Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soka Posted November 18, 2008 Report Share Posted November 18, 2008 Instead of bothering to learn kanji, my cunning master plan is to wait forty years or so, at which point no Japanese people will understand the damn things either. =) Not only that, if things continue like now, maybe no Japanese people will speak Japanese at that time. I'm amazed at how every day more and more native words are replaced with their English counterpart. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted November 18, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 18, 2008 Do you mean that Japanese is a dying language? Will all japanese anime and manga in the future be in English? Or in Hiragana/Katakana only? In ten years from now? Or one hundred? Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Soka Posted November 18, 2008 Report Share Posted November 18, 2008 In one hundred years who knows. Now talking seriously, I don't think it will come to that (and I really hope it won't happen) but it's a fact that people (maybe influenced by the Japanese mass media obsession with English words) are using more loan words in every day talk. Lots of native words are being replaced by English (well, engrish to be more precise). We often joke with my Japanese sensei that maybe we should have gone to the next classroom where English is being taught whenever engrish words like サラリーマン(sarariiman) instead of 会社員(kaishain) or ジャーナリスト(jaanarisuto) instead of 記者(kisha) appear in the lesson we are seeing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted November 24, 2008 Author Report Share Posted November 24, 2008 My issue with Mnemosyne is solved :) For some reason, I have to choose the XIM input method instead of SCIM… to enable SCIM! Well, anyway, I have SCIM working fine, and I'm happy :) (And I saw no problem with my French dvorak keyboard so far) Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.