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KanjiVG – SVGs of Kanji character strokes including order, shape and direction
- wahnfrieden 4y agoIt’s too bad the pitch data out there for Japanese is either proprietary or pirated without attribution Another resource: https://github.com/CaptainDario/DaKanji-Single-Kanji-Recognition https://github.com/CaptainDario/DaKanji-Single-Kanji-Recogni... someone made an interesting kanji recognition lib that hasn’t gotten attention
- krackers 4y agoGiven a large enough corpus of spoken lines, could you do some ML magic to get the pitch accents (maybe even just FFT and a simple classifier would do)? I'm aware that the "base" pitch accent does change in context so it's not quite trivial, but it seems like you could get pretty close? Edit: Found https://mizoru.github.io/blog/2021/12/25/Japanese-pitch.html https://mizoru.github.io/blog/2021/12/25/Japanese-pitch.html
- wahnfrieden 4y agoThe pitch variants are also highly regional but that’s an interesting idea. I wouldn’t want to give it to learners in use cases I can think of, when correct data is available though (just with licensing headaches/costs) The correct data already exists, so I'm not sure what the point is besides having a less accurate but freer option
- aikinai 4y ago99% (or more) of the recordings you might find for training would be in the standard accent unless you were specifically digging for regional accents.
- wahnfrieden 4y agoit's also changing generationally
- gfaure 4y agoThis linked article seems to have gotten special access to the data -- unfortunately only the resulting model is available.
- rjh29 4y agoIt predates modern ML, but that's what Suzuki-kun does: https://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/ https://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/
- krackers 4y agoI don't think Suzuki-kun was trained on voice data, they trained a classifier on an annotated text corpus. And getting access to such a corpus is probably much harder than finding voice samples. https://research.ibm.com/publications/accent-sandhi-estimation-of-tokyo-dialect-of-japanese-using-conditional-random-fields https://research.ibm.com/publications/accent-sandhi-estimati...
- rjh29 4y agoIt seems like most people use the NHK pitch accent dictionary (there are TSVs of it online). I don't feel like it's particularly "pirated" though, can you really pirate the way people actually pronounce words?
- wahnfrieden 4y agoNHK didn’t give that data an open license Piracy is rampant. Whether lifting and reusing/redistributing copyrighted dictionaries or other stud materials, or pirating ebook/cdrom type content. That’s nice, but as a legit service provider it’s less accessible without just giving users their own ability to side load in materials
- kouteiheika 4y ago> It’s too bad the pitch data out there for Japanese is either proprietary or pirated without attribution I have serious doubts whether this kind of data is even copyrightable, as long as you're not redistributing it verbatim. A specific selection of words with pitch data (e.g. the NKH pitch dictionary) might be copyrightable as there was creative expression involved in picking which exact words to put into the dictionary and in what order. But the data itself? A 猫 is always going to have a HLL pitch accent (in the standard accent). That's a fact. And facts itself are not copyrightable. You can't copyright a phone book[1]. Quoting from the case: > "Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another's publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement" Sounds exactly like the pitch accent data dump that's been floating around which a lot of people use. (Not the verbatim NHK one; the other one.) They probably used the data from NHK's pitch dictionary to compile it along with a few other dictionaries. But does it feature the same selection and arrangement? Nope. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications%2C_Inc.%2C_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications%2C_Inc.%2C_....
- wahnfrieden 4y agoI see apps pay to license data from https://www.cjk.org https://www.cjk.org for pitch accent data. I don't know what their data looks like though. Maybe you're right and their business case for this data is essentially a scam, or there is non-factual copyrightable data, or the law is different in Japan, I don't know.
- nathanwh 4y agoThere's also a stroke order font which is used in the Anki deck I have for learning kanji. The svgs in the post look great, but as far as I can tell there's not an easy way to copy the actual kanji character (you can get it from the actual SVG source however). The font is nice because as far as the clipboard is concerned it's just the character. https://www.nihilist.org.uk/ https://www.nihilist.org.uk/
- notpushkin 4y agoIt's generated from KanjiVG though: https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/projects.html https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/projects.html
- bmalicoat 4y agoKanjiVG is awesome. I used it for a free kanji app I made for iOS and Android. Figuring out how to write an SVG parser + renderer wasn't as tricky as I thought when I set out to do it. https://www.bjmalicoat.com/projects/kanjibook https://www.bjmalicoat.com/projects/kanjibook
- bkbullock 4y ago[dead]
- bmalicoat 4y agoDone! Thanks for letting me know, I totally missed that section.
- huhtenberg 4y agoVery nice. I might even get a sticker :) One thing that IMO is missing is the audio playback option for readings. This would've greatly facilitated remembering readings. AWS Polly is very easy to integrate with and it costs next to nothing. /nudge /nudge.
- bmalicoat 4y agoGreat suggestion. I couldn't find an audio source I liked. I'll take a look, thanks.
- huhtenberg 4y agoOn Polly "Takumi/neural" voice is the best option.
- innocentoldguy 4y agoKanjiVG is pretty cool. The color coding for radicals and stroke orders is nice. Also, parsing and using the SVGs is fairly straight forward. Having owned a couple of books that had the stroke orders wrong while I was learning Japanese, I always check for mistakes in the stroke orders of kanji like 右 (right) and 左 (left) to make sure they're correct. KanjiVG gets it right. On a tangentially related note, I recently purchased an iOS Japanese dictionary app called "Nihongo" (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nihongo-japanese-dictionary/id881697245 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nihongo-japanese-dictionary/id...) for my daughter because she wanted to study Japanese. I was just expecting a basic course, but it is probably the best vocabulary/kanji studying app I've ever used. It's a little pricey, but well worth it if you're trying to build a strong Japanese vocabulary or learning to read kanji. I have no affiliation with the people who make the app. I'm just an impressed buyer.
- bkbullock 4y ago[dead]
- zxspectrum1982 4y agoThis looks very much like Make Me A Hanzi (MMAH), which is exactly the same (Chinese) characters. It's just that Japanese knows those as Kanji. https://github.com/skishore/makemeahanzi https://github.com/skishore/makemeahanzi
- mananaysiempre 4y ago(Caveat: there are a handful of cases where the Chinese and Japanese stroke orders differ, so take care treating these as equivalent.)
- Dalewyn 4y agoThis. Traditional Chinese and Japanese are two seemingly similar but distinctly different things (the latter is forked from the former). Simplified Chinese is a whole different beast of corruption that is a fork of Traditional Chinese but otherwise not similar to either.
- mytailorisrich 4y agoKanji were also simplified but not necessarily the same way as simplified Chinese. Simplified Chinese also sometimes uses 'old' characters. So sometimes modern Japanese is actually similar to simplified Chinese, sometimes it is similar to traditional Chinese, and sometimes it is unique. There is no simple 'fork'. For instance, 円 (yen) is simplified Japanese and uniquely Japanese. It used to be same as traditional Chinese 圓. In Chinese it was separately simplified twice to its current form 元. So when you see prices in 円 in Japan and 元 in China it's actually the same original character simplified differently. Interestingly, traditional Chinese 國 was simplified by reusing an old character and is now 国 both in Japanese and simplified Chinese but not in traditional Chinese. Why not.
- Macha 4y agoSometimes Blink is similar to WebKit, sometimes it is similar to KHTML and sometimes it is unique. I think the fork analogy still holds, no one says forks can't have convergent evolution or cross pollination
- KingLancelot 4y ago[dead]
- emursebrian 4y agoI used this in my Anki deck for John Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. The stroke ordering was helpful and it was animated with CSS. It's been a while, so I can't remember who to give credit to for the RTK deck or the CSS animations. I also built a little tool that would expand out the Kanji character into its constituent radicals and Heisig primitives so I could at them to my study code. At that time, I was reading NHK Web News Easy on a regular basis and wanted to study those characters with Heisig's visual approach.
- esrh 4y agoI also used this with anki, but i wanted some interactivity and practice actually physically writing stuff out combined with spaced rep. Resulted in some pretty gnarly code using kanjivg, pygame and ankiconnect: https://github.com/eshrh/anki-kunren https://github.com/eshrh/anki-kunren
- tomodachi94 4y agoHmm, this reminds me of Jim Rose's stroke order diagram retrographer-editor[0] (SODER) from some time ago. [0]: https://archive.org/details/soder https://archive.org/details/soder
- bkbullock 4y agoThat seems to have been uploaded on February 11 2023. I remember kanjicafe.com, which used to have a giant picture of Jim Rose's face for some reason. The site seems to have gone now. https://web.archive.org/web/20040925183635/http://kanjicafe.com/ https://web.archive.org/web/20040925183635/http://kanjicafe....
- tomodachi94 4y agoThere's a bunch of 2000s-era Japanese content up at <http://ftp.edrdg.org/pub/Nihongo/00INDEX.html http://ftp.edrdg.org/pub/Nihongo/00INDEX.html>; I've been uploading some it it to the Internet Archive. The GIF you mentioned is on there, as well as SODER.
- dtgriscom 4y agoI'd never really understood just how complex these characters can be. Sure, there's a lot going on at first glance, but seeing the stroke order and direction, and imagining the process, really hammers it home to this monolingual American.
- Waterluvian 4y agoWhy does stroke order matter? Is it to handle animating them and if each stroke isn’t the same colour? Sorry but I don’t know much about these kinds of characters.
- do_anh_tu 4y agoBecause when you handwriting, the stroke order is very important.
- wingerlang 4y agoVery important due to, tradition?
- Hasnep 4y agoAs a beginner Mandarin learner, my understanding is that historically, people wrote using the traditional stroke order, this informed what people think of as the aesthetically pleasing or "correct" way that the characters look. Now, if you want to write the characters in a legible and aesthetically pleasing way, the easiest method is to write them in the traditional stroke order. I think it's analogous to the way cursive writing in the west was taught, which informed the way it was written and what people thought of as the "correct" way to write cursive. If you wanted to learn to write in cursive, you could just look at existing cursive writing and try to copy it, but if for example you guessed that you should write it from right to left then you'd probably find it harder because cursive evolved to be written from left to right. You can normally tell when someone uses the incorrect stroke order because things will be the wrong size. For example, when writing 因 you're supposed to write the outer ㄇ first, then the inner 大 and then the bottom horizontal stroke of the 口. If you start with the 大 then it's harder to write the outer 口 the right size. Again, this is all from a beginner, so take it with a good amount of salt.
- hashmush 4y agoWriting by hand leads to optimizations, such as not lifting the pen a lot. This means that the movement between strokes also gets drawn. A 10 stroke character might end up being one single continuous path (effectively 10 strokes + 9 connections). Depending on stroke order, the results can be wildly different. So consistency makes sense for the result to be intelligible.
- anonfunction 4y agoI looked around and couldn't find any examples or demo of the SVGs on the website. This is the epitome of a project that would benefit from a visual representation.
- lbotos 4y agohttps://kanjivg.tagaini.net/viewer.html?kanji=%E5%8B%95 https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/viewer.html?kanji=%E5%8B%95
- bkbullock 4y ago[dead]
- bkbullock 4y agoTo ameliorate this problem, I've moved the "Viewer" link to immediately underneath the "Home" on the left side menu on the latest version of the website.
- nojs 4y agoIf anyone is looking for animated stroke orders for Chinese characters, Hanzi5 is by far the best resource [1]. I built a small app to make them searchable too [2]. 1. http://www.hanzi5.com/ http://www.hanzi5.com/ 2. https://dragonmandarin.com https://dragonmandarin.com
- bkbullock 4y agoThe above web site offers animated stroke orders, see the "animate" button on https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/viewer.html https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/viewer.html Credit for the project is at the bottom of the page.
- TheDong 4y agoThe originally posted website offers animated stroke order for japanese kanji, which is not necessarily the same as for chinese characters. For example, enter 田 into both the original website (https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/viewer.html?kanji=%E7%94%B0 https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/viewer.html?kanji=%E7%94%B0) and hanzi5 (http://www.hanzi5.com/bishun/7530.html http://www.hanzi5.com/bishun/7530.html), and you'll see that the stroke order differs. There are also several chinese characters which are not present in that japanese viewer, for example 厅
- presentation 4y agoI like the stroke orders for the romaji.
- bkbullock 4y ago[dead]
- pancrufty 4y agoIMHO it’s high time China and Japan went the enlightened Hangul way Korea took half a millennia ago. There’s no reason to keep to absurdity going any longer; even they don’t know how to type their own words and use pinyin as input. The Vietnamese way would also be easy with their explicit tones written on each vowel, however they lost the advantages that blocky characters offer.
- mbwgh 4y agoSee also the linked projects (https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/projects.html https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/projects.html), which seem like a valuable resource. I only looked at https://www.tanoshiijapanese.com/home/ https://www.tanoshiijapanese.com/home/ and already thought this site is just insane with what it offers for free.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]