- Preliminary support for 6th edition, new lessons page17 June 2013
- The implementation for multiple indexes for RTK 6th Edition is a lot of work. I've been thinking of a temporary solution, which also happen to be a prototype for a new lessons page (forum thread).
- JapanesePod101 6-Month Premium is 45% OFF17 June 2013
- JapanesePod101 is running a promotion called the "6 Month Challenge":
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- Character pronunciation on the Study page3 June 2013
- A minor update today adds one common On reading (on-yomi) below the character on the Study pages. This was requested for Reviewing the Hanzi, and I figured it might be useful also here.
Please note there is only one On reading displayed per character. The intention is not to document fully each character but to provide an additional cue for the mnemonics, which is the main focus of the Study pages.
Also note that for very common Japanese characters there are often two or more common readings, therefore if the one you see is not the one you expected, it may just have a frequency that is slightly above another common reading.
- Remembering the Kanji 6th Edition Support21 May 2013
- I've been procrastinating on this for a long time... it's just one of those things that require a lot of changes and testing, but is not really exciting to do.
Technically speaking, it's not very difficult. It will require an extra table in the database. It will have an impact on speed of querries, but maybe I'll be able to simplify and reduce the number of querries in some places... the code is really old.
So far I'm identifying these tasks:
* Manage Pages: add an explicit "RTK Nth Edition" label anywhere the user is expected to enter a frame number. The label would be a clickable link that takes you to the Options page to set the current index or "sequence" for the characters.
* Options: a new Options page is required for the user to chose the character sequence. For most people this will be 5th or 6th edition, however it will also be possible to add community-made sequences, such as "RTK Lite".
* Refactoring: pretty much 80% of the MySQL queries assume that there is one fixed sequence of characters, they all have to be updated with an additional table to "map" the actual UTF-8 character to an arbitrary sequence number (aka "frame number" for Heisig's method).
* Additional refactoring is required because the total number of characters is not the same. 6th edition includes 2200 characters, while 5th edition includes 2042 characters. Simple logic like: if frame_num < 2043 then book_title = "Volume 1". won't work.
* More refactoring is required because if we want to support custom sequences such as RTK Lite , we can no longer assume that the frame number sequence is sequential, and it may have gaps. So eg, instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 a custom sequence could look like 1, 3, 20, 25 (random example).
* Another thing to consider is to allow for non-digit sequence numbers. I don't remember for sure right now but I think 6th edition includes frame numbers like "123a" and "123b". At this point, you can see that the frame number can no longer be treated as an index in the database, at all. It has to be a completely arbitrary label, that can be linked to any UTF-8 character. There is still a sequence, but internally in the database used for optimizing querries and probably for sorting as well.
* Testing: eventually I'll have to go through all features, systematically, and test them one by one to check that everything is working. When you refactor a lot of code, it's almost certain that things will be broken.
- Bugfix: Kanji sight-reading practice7 March 2013
- A minor update today fixes a bug with the Kanji sight-reading practice page ("Reading" tab). Due to some refactoring I did in the last update all RTK kanji were highlighted, regardless of which ones were added to your flashcards.
It's fixed now and should only highlight and display keywords for the kanji that are in your flashcards. Thank to havkai for reporting the bug on the Feedback forum.
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