kdrill is a program to drill users on meanings of kanji characters. Various formats of drills are available:
kanji to kana
english to kanji
kana to kanji
The user can restrict the range of kanji to drill on in different, yet compatible, ways. The first way is to make a "usefile" (described below), with a an explicit list of desired kanji. A second way to limit the range of the drill is to change the gradelevel. This can be done by clicking the Grade: button, using the -gradelevel flag, or setting the gradelevel resource.
kdrill will use the "kanjidic" file to interpret many of the various 16-bit kanji chars in the kanji24 font supplied with the X11R5 distribution. It checks for a file by the name of usefile in the current directory, although this name can be changed either with the '-usefile' option, or in a resource file.
kanjidic subdivides its entries into grade levels, and frequency ratings. Grade levels are similar to school grade levels, but more compressed. For kdrill's purposes, grade levels start at 1, and increase to 6. There are many kanji that do not have a grade level, due to their infrequency of use. You may specify that you only with to see kanji of a certain grade level or lower. To use ALL kanji, you may specify gradelevel as 0. Grade level 0 is the default, unless a resource file for kanjidrill has been installed to override this.
kanjidic also has a frequency rating for the top 2000 or so kanji. Kdrill will display this for your information, but the program does not attach any significance to the number at present.
Any grade level or frequency rating the current kanji has, will be displayed in the top right hand side of the window, next to the "G:" and "F:" letters. The kanji number will be displayed in hexadecimal(base 16) after the "#:" sign. It is displayed in hexadecimal because that is what kanjidic, xfd, and the usefile display.
A usefile consists of a list of hex numbers; one per line, no initial spaces allowed. A usefile makes the program only use particular kanji, instead of the thousands possible in the dictionary. It is possible to add comment lines by having the very first character of a line be "#". It is also possible to add english reminders after the number on each line, so you remember what each number is. Hex numbers can be checked or found by using the "xfd" util on the "kanji24" font.
Grade restrictions will apply to ALL kanji selected, even if you have a usefile. Thus, if all your usefile-defined kanji are of grade 4 or higher, and you have selected grade 3 as a cut-off point, kdrill will complain that there are not enough kanji available, and attempt to increase the grade level.
If you have a usefile, and wish the program to ignore it, you can run "kdrill -usefile none", and it will ignore it. "none" is NOT a keyword. If you actually have a file in your directory named "none", use a different word.
At the monu6 site, both the dictionary and this program can currently be found in /pub/nihongo
(Who does not speak Japanese or Chinese, but hopes to one day)
Philip Brown hereby gives permission to use, and/or modify this code, so long as it it not sold for profit, and the author's name appears somewhere in the code. Seperate derivative works are not covered by this restriction.