I hear and I forget
I see and I remember I do and I understand - old Chinese proverb |
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Begin by opening the Exercise list (select Open > Exercise list...
from the Dictionary menu, or use command-E. As a first example,
type 'ichi' in the Kana text box and click the Spyglass button (see figure
1 below). The dictionaries will be scanned and 5 entries should be
displayed in the Output list. Notice that each word is color-coded
and shown in full Japanese script starting from left to right with its
Kanji, Kana, English and word type (in square brackets). The operation
you've just performed is equivalent to looking up a Japanese word in a
printed Kana dictionary, but it's taken only seconds to find matching dictionary
entries, and you didn't have to turn a single page.
The names of the dictionary files that the computer searched through when you pressed the Spyglass button are shown in the Exercise list. Each dictionary in this list was scanned in turn, starting from the top entry. If you'd like to look at this list, close the Exercise list and select Exercise list... from the Dictionary menu. Note that all dictionary files (including the ones on this list) must reside in the Dict folder - this ensures that they can always be located in a consistent place on your computer.
The Reference list and Kana-to-Kanji list operate similarly to the Exercise list, though each of these dictionary lists is used for a different purpose. The Exercise list is used primarily for the exercise system, the Reference list is used for general reference purposes (such as translating Japanese text) and the Kana-to-Kanji list is used for the 'Magic find' Kanji input system in the Japanese wordprocessor. Opening an individual dictionary is also possible, and allows some additional special operations to be performed, such as moving and deleting words.
Now open the Exercise list again (if you closed it) to continue this tutorial. Selecting words in the Output list can give you full access to the multimedia objects attached to the word (ie. pictures, sounds and notes). The 'Hiragana sample' and 'Cartoon sample' dictionaries contain both pictures and sounds (Japanese pronunciation), and are good sample multimedia dictionaries to examine. To look at all the words in these sample dictionaries, go back to the Find word dialog, press the Zap button (this clears all information from the Find word dialog) and then press the Spyglass button.
The first six words in the Output list are from these multimedia sample dictionaries. Click the top word to highlight it, and then hold down the shift key and click the sixth word. You will see this set of six words become highlighted. Now select Look at... from the Word menu to bring up the Media dialog. Use the Next and Previous arrows at the bottom right of the dialog to move between words. Click the Play sound button to hear its pronunciation. If there is a note attached to any word (ie. example sentences, special usage, humble and polite forms, etc), you can also click the Look at note button. Click the Period button to dismiss the Media dialog.
Now press the Zap button to clear all information in the Find Word dialog again, and enter 'adj' in the word Type text box (or select it from the popup menu alongside the box). Click the Spyglass button (or hit return). This search should find 11 words - these are all adjectives. You can verify that 'adj' means 'adjective' by selecting the Word types card in the online help system (select Word type codes from the Windows menu or press Command-9 to bring up this card).
As a simple exercise, use what you've just learned to look for pronouns and adverbs.
Press Zap again. Enter 'day' in the English text box and click the Spyglass button. 23 words will be found when this search has completed - notice that you have found words in which 'day' occurs in any part of the English definition. If you click the 'whole words' check box and search again, only whole words which match the English definition will be displayed. Try this now - you should see 17 entries come up. What this demonstrates is that you can now find a Japanese word even if you can only remember a small part of its English definition. How's that for raw power!
As an exercise, look for words which have 'up' and 'flower' in their English definitions.
Now for some more advanced searching. Press Zap to empty out all the information in the Find Word dialog again, and then press the Kanji button (see figure 2 below) - the Select Kanji dialog will appear. Type in 'nichi' (as the Kanji reading), press the Find Kanji button (the button with the Kanji character in it) and click the single Kanji that comes up to select it.
You'll notice the 'nichi' Kanji appear in the Find Word dialog. Also, a '?' will be automatically inserted as the reading of the Kanji.
Important note: Whenever a '?' appears in the Kana area, the Kana will be ignored during a search. To put it another way: if there is no '?' in the Kana area, the Kana will be checked during a search, as usual.
Now press the Spyglass button - 22 words should be found. When you look through these words, you'll find that each word has the 'nichi' Kanji somewhere in it, but not necessarily in the first position. The reason is that it has found all words with this Kanji irrespective of where the Kanji was located in the word. If you compare this to looking up words in a normal Kanji dictionary (such as the Nelson), you will appreciate that you now only need to enter any Kanji in a compound to find it in the dictionary. This provides much greater freedom and control in locating dictionary entries.
If you look back at the Select Kanji dialog, you will see that you can find Kanji by reading, radical, radical number, stroke count, Nelson code, Halpern code, JWM code, English meaning, frequency of use and Grade level. You can now use any method to find the Kanji you need.
Try looking up some other words by their Kanji. You might try the Kanji for 'mizu' (water).
Most students get a page or two of new vocabulary to learn every week during their Japanese language course. Wouldn't it be great if JWM could emulate those weekly pages of vocabulary so you could find any one of them in a flash? Well, you guessed it, you can. That is what the Year, Lesson and Group text boxes allow you to do - group vocabulary into blocks.
You can use the Group number to collect words together so that they can then be located as a block. You might like to allocate the Group number 1 to dialogues, 2 to passages, 3 to vocabulary lists, etc, etc. This allocation is totally up to you. For example, in the 'Basic sample' dictionary provided with this demo, words are collected into lessons to introduce 10 new Kanji at a time for the first 80 Kanji. Their Year number is also set to 1 (to indicate first year level), and their Group number is set to 2. A concise breakdown of how the sample dictionaries are set up is shown in the section entitled, 'Setting up exercises'.
We have now worked through finding words by their Japanese Kana, Kanji, word type, English definition and Lesson/Year/Group. With JWM, you are free to combine this search information to narrow down which words you find. For example, if you wanted the Japanese verb for 'meet', you could enter 'meet' in the English text box and 'v' in the word type text box - only entries which matched both these conditions would be found.
To edit a word, you need to open a dictionary or dictionary list, find the word and then click it in the Output list. Now select Edit... from the Word menu to bring up the Edit word dialog. You can then edit it and manipulate the media objects attached to the word. After you have finished your changes, press the OK button to save them (Note: saving is disabled in this demo version).
When you have an individual dictionary open, the Move to dictionary... and Delete functions (in the Word menu) can be applied to words shown in the Output list. In addition, you can add new words (by selecting New...). You can also allocate Lesson numbers to correspond with each week of your course, set Group numbers to separate words into groups for dialogues, passages, vocabulary lists, upcoming tests, oral readings, etc. You can even create your own custom Kana or Kanji flashcards by entering only a single Kana/Kanji with its English meaning (the 'Hiragana sample' dictionary is set up in this way).
For further information, please see the comprehensive illustrated User
Manual provided in the commercial version of the JWM software. This User
Manual explains JWM's features in detail, including a section on the preparation
of various media objects (pictures and sounds).
Note: The multimedia sample dictionaries are already set up for exercises. If you wish to start exercising immediately, go straight to the section below entitled 'Doing exercises' and come back to this point in the tutorial when you are ready to proceed.
To continue the structured course: select Lesson planner... from the Exercises menu and tick the next lesson in the list. Then start exercises (yes, it is now that simple!).
To search individually for words you wish to learn, you first need a list of words - this list may be the printed weekly vocabulary list given to you by your teacher, or any other group of words (or explicit Kanji) you wish to memorise. For the sake of this example, we'll only use words which are contained in the sample dictionaries. If you want to use words not contained in the sample dictionaries, you need to add words to a dictionary. Note: this demo version of JWM does not allow you to create new dictionary files or save new dictionary entries.
Let's say your list looks like the one shown in figure 4 below.
Begin by making sure you have the Exercise list open, and then press Zap in the Find Word dialog. Type 'hachi' into the Kana text box and click the Spyglass. The dictionaries will be scanned and this word will be found and displayed in Japanese script in the Output list.
The status of a word is shown by the letter on its left side: 'L' for Learning, 'M' for Mastered and blank for Unused (currently there should be a blank on the left side of 'hachi'). To change its status, hold down the option key and click it - a small 'L' will come up next to it. Words set to Learning status in this way are focussed on during exercises, which is the purpose of setting a word to this status.
Use the above find/option-click procedure to go through the rest of the sample vocabulary list, setting the status of each word to Learning. Once you have done this, clear the Find Word dialog again and search for words set to Learning status (Hint: select Learning from the status popup menu and then click the Spyglass). You will see a number of words shown in the output list (some had already been set up), including the ones you have just changed (which will appear at the bottom of the list). These are all the words which will be emphasised during exercises.
To obtain detailed information about any of the Kanji shown on the Exercise dialog (see figure 5), simply click a Kanji and an information screen will be displayed. It will show the Kanji's various readings, it's English meaning (in the demo, this feature is disabled), Bushu, etc, etc. Thus, if you are in the middle of exercising and want to get more information, it can be found very easily.
Note that an integral part of the JWM study system is both the reading and writing of Kanji. To gain the most from the system, you should always write down Kanji on a piece of paper during the exercise process - this gives you practice in writing Kanji correctly (since you check your written Kanji against that shown on the screen). The special Kanji font provided in JWM was developed from characters written by a master Japanese calligrapher, so provide a very good example of proper writing style.
Now follow the instructional prompts shown at the bottom left of the screen, using either the mouse to click buttons or the speedkeys (to see which speedkeys are assigned, select Options... from the Exercises menu and look at Button mapping on the bottom left of the dialog). When the prompt message says 'View Word...', clicking anywhere on the screen or pressing any key will bring up both the Japanese and English for a word.
Any pictures or sounds attached to words will be automatically included during the exercise process. This can provide a substantial boost in improving your retention of vocabulary, since both visual and auditory stimulation is provided. If you wish to focus only on the words themselves, the autoplay feature can be disabled (select Options... from the Exercises menu to do this).
User feedback is also provided in the form of an hourly timer and a success bar on the right side of the Exercise dialog. The timer will help you reach your study time goals since it provides an immediate indication of progress - if one hour per day of vocabulary and Kanji study is the goal, then one rotation of the timer is needed to reach it (see figure 5).
The JWM exercise system uses a multisession method to promote long term retention of vocabulary and Kanji. It will usually take at least two exercise sessions for you to properly learn a word - when the Artificial Intelligence Algorithm (AIA) built into JWM thinks you know a word well enough, it will automatically change the status of the word from Learning to Mastered. Thus, after a few sessions, you will see words with Mastered status in the dictionaries (Hint: you can do a search using word status at any time to find out which words these are).
The AIA is fairly sophisticated, and its operation may seem a bit confusing at first, but after some use you should intuitively feel an underlying pattern emerging in the way it selects words. If the way the exercise system works seems a bit confusing at first, don't despair - simply relax and concentrate on exercising and let the AIA do its job in the background. It really does work.
You will find Mastered words mixed with Learning words during exercises after a few sessions - this automated study strategy ensures that you are exposed to previous vocabulary and Kanji on an ongoing basis. If you think back to how you used to study vocabulary (ie. from printed pages), you will probably appreciate that (without revision) about 80% of your initial skills diminished after about 3 weeks.
JWM is designed specifically to train your long term memory as well as helping your learn new words and Kanji. Thus, if you use the system regularly, the words (and Kanji) you learned in the first week of your course should be as fresh in your mind as those you learned in the last few weeks. Benefits can be gained by experienced students of Japanese as well (including qualified translators), since with JWM you will be systematically exposed to all Kanji you know rather than having to rely on random (and uncontrolled) exposure through reading passages of Japanese text.
This incredibly effective study strategy is only available with the Japanese WordMage system.
The two buttons on the top left of the Text dialog are the Magic find search button and the Paste to New word dialog button respectively (of course, you need to have a dictionary open and the New Word dialog displayed to paste to the New Word dialog).
A Magic find search automatically determines if you selected a Kana, Kanji or English section of text, and adapts the search method appropriately. To try out this very powerful and fast translation system, work through exercise a) in the 'Tutorial text (demo)' file.
To get information about any Kana or Kanji, hold down the shift key and click a character in the text window. In the case of Kana, you will see the Kana reading, whether it is Hiragana or Katakana, and the stroke order of the character. For Kanji, the full Kanji information screen is displayed including the English meaning, On and Kun readings, Nelson and Halpern codes, stroke count, frequency of use, etc. Click the stroke order button on the Kanji information screen to bring up the Kanji stroke order display.
Note: Japanese WordMage can open (and automatically convert) any normal Macintosh Japanese text file (these are always encoded in a format called Shift-JIS, or SJIS) as well as Old-JIS, New-JIS and NEC-JIS format text files. These four types of text formats are most often used. To read EUC format text files (from Unix machines), you will need to convert the text to SJIS format using a conversion utility such as 'JConv' (widely available on the Internet, including our own web site - see the chapter of this document called 'Lava Software on the web').
You can use the Japanese text translation aid to read your Japanese email (ie. if you have pen-friends in Japan), passages of Japanese text prepared by your teacher, the multitude of Japanese text resources available on the Internet and even the various Japanese newspapers and online magazines available on the World Wide Web. Links to many of these resources can be found at our web site.
This feature of JWM opens up an incredible array of possibilities to enhance your Japanese studies. You can read the 'Asahi Shimbun' or 'Mainichi Shimbun' on a daily basis and use JWM's powerful translation aid to help you. You can thus keep up with Japanese news from a Japanese perspective, and be on the leading edge in terms of information about what is happening in Japan as well as the rest of the world. With JWM, Japanese study takes on a profound new immediacy and relevance.
Note: In your web browser (such as Netscape), you can save the text displayed on the screen to a file (select Save As... from the File menu from within Netscape). You can also save the source to your hard disk by selecting Page Source from the View menu. Once saved as a Japanese text file, it can then be opened and read using Japanese WordMage (you can also open any normal English text file using JWM).
Of course, you can also copy text directly from your browser window and paste it into the JWM text dialog for translation.
If you are a teacher, this is a great way to prepare Japanese texts for your students and include an accompanying dictionary (vocabulary list) of words from the passage. Your students can then also exercise with this vocabulary list as part of their study program. You can now provide them with a new passage of text on a weekly basis and include their new Kanji and vocabulary in a fast and efficient way.
You can also change and update course content easily since there is much less need to produce printed matter. This vastly simplifies the dissemination of new course materials. Simply release new master files on a designated computer on a weekly basis. Your students can load the files onto their own disk and do their study at their own pace. The Classroom Edition of Japanese WordMage is designed specifically for this purpose.
The type of Japanese texts you might prepare include descriptive passages, stories, dialogues, plays, grammar lessons, example sentences which demonstrate the use of particular words and grammatical templates - basically any type of course material which you currently supply as printed matter. With accompanying dictionaries, you can include all types of multimedia effects with texts including color pictures, extensive usage notes, pronunciation information and sound effects. Anything you can draw, write or say can be included in JWM in some way.
Japanese WordMage is also a complete cross-platform Japanese language solution since it runs on Macintosh, Windows 95, Windows 3.1, DOS 6.0 and above, OS/2 Warp, Windows NT 4.x, Linux and NextStep. All dictionaries, text files and other resources are also completely compatible across all platforms. In addition, when you purchase Japanese WordMage, you are purchasing a license to use versions for all platforms. Thus, whether you intend to use JWM yourself or purchase it for your school, JWM provides you with the perfect long-term Japanese language solution!
To create a new Japanese document, select New... from the Text menu.
All features of the translation aid are also available in the wordprocessor, including comprehensive information on Kana and Kanji when you shift-click a character. You can also paste text into the New Word dialog using the paste buttons on the top left of the Text dialog.
You can set the left, right, top and bottom margins of a document by selecting the Document... menu item in the Text menu. The print font size can also be set from 12 to 24 points (allowing you to adjust the size of the text printed) and you can set the paper size, layout and orientation by selecting Page Setup.... Print quality is very good on all styles of laser printer, but of course the quality depends on the type of printer you are using for your printouts. Note: printing is disabled in this demo version.
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End notes
This tutorial provides some information on how to use the JWM system - hopefully enough for you to appreciate the depth and power available to the average user, as well as its potential for the classroom environment.
The User Manual supplied with the full package contains detailed information on all aspects of using Japanese WordMage, including the creation of custom multimedia dictionaries.