Comments: SAIKAM.

I just found this: Bisqwit's Japanese language related tools - list

Lots of interesting Japanese-related tools there. (The SKIP interface looks curiously similar to the one that you link.)

Posted by Patrick Hall at June 25, 2005 06:11 PM

That's true in that both are trying to circumvent the need for users to recognise or stroke-count radicals. The "Easy, Advanced, Hard, Name, All" and "by frequency" bit is an interesting approach... I would have thought that by the time you knew whether a kanji was "advanced" or "hard" and its relative frequency, you wouldn't really need to look it up any more.

Also, did you notice from the ABOUT page that the site uses EDICT and KANJIDICT as its backend? (For that part of the dictionary, anyway!) Yet another thing to thank Jim Breen for...

Posted by Matt at June 25, 2005 08:32 PM

That Bisquit site is cool--and I can't believe he's Finnish, and he's done all that in English. A bookmark-worthy site.

Posted by mj at June 26, 2005 06:41 AM

The Finns seem to have learned English en masse since I was there in '71, when nobody knew it; everybody knew Russian, but nobody wanted to speak it, so the only guy I could chat with was the caretaker of the Russian Orthodox cathedral.

Posted by language hat at June 26, 2005 07:42 AM

To language hat: You write about Finns in 1971: "everybody knew Russian..."
This is totally untrue. Only a small fraction
knew Russian. The percentage of pupils learning
any Russian at school must have below 10%. And
they all wanted to use it. I wonder how you have
come up with this kind of misinformed view.
Aarno

Posted by Aarno Hohti at July 25, 2005 09:04 AM

I would think it was obvious I was not making an informed sociological-historical statement but giving my impressions as a college student arriving for the first time in a country I wasn't familiar with. My impression was that people seemed to know Russian but didn't want to speak it. Obviously you're better informed. Sorry to have offended you.

Posted by language hat at July 25, 2005 11:12 AM

Thank you for the clarification. I'm sorry for being excessively critical. It is just that I happened to be a grammar school student at that time and choosing languages was somewhat important. One had to choose a primary and a secondary foreign language. The choice for the
primary one was between English and German. It was very rare to (be able to) choose the latter.
So 95% (I believe) had English. For the secondary
foreign language, students could choose German,
French, Russian, English... Some students actually
chose to study Russian at that time and it was
sometimes politically motivated, sometimes just
pure interest.

Posted by Aarno Hohti at July 29, 2005 09:32 AM