V0.1 Super Beta
In Japan, the 電子辞書/denshi jisho/Electronic Dictionary is a mainstay when doing any language learning, be it English, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, etc. From late elementary school to professional life, these devices are ubiquitous on the desks and briefcases of the language learner in Japan.
These devices support younger students with basic dictionary functions, Kanji dictionary (as these are learned through the school life and are an animal in their own right), encyclopedic lookups, etc. They sometimes also offer support for mathematics learning, reading, Japanese grammar, etc. They are super useful as a fast, dedicated device specifically meant to help the user lookup items quickly with little previous knowledge on the item.
During my own language studies (specifically Japanese) I always looked for a denshi jisho that could help me. There are many great apps for phones and computers that satisfy many of these same functions listed above, but there are several drawbacks from my point of view:
- There is no "one app" to use, you have to cobble together several apps and keep switching from one to the other.
- The constant interruptions from messages, internet, email, etc. sap my attention and focus, which is hard to get back.
- Sometimes will not work without internet connectivity.
- Some apps are not easily portable from platform to platform.
- I lose the ability to access the device (i.e. phone) for what I was originally using the device form.
- Less than stellar ergonomics.
All these reasons drove me to find one (plus, the cool factor is always there ;) but jisho being predominently Japanese used item are all in Japanese and are not provided in other languages. Couple having to learn the language just to use the device (then why would I need the device....) and it's steep price tag (good ones run north of $300), I decided to use the opportunity to create something I could use, learn new programming skills in Python, and make something I can call my own.
Any platform that can support Python 3.
All development currently only being done on Raspberry Pi 4B+ hardware, Raspbian 10 Buster.
I wanted to initially use microcontroller for this project (Raspberry Pico, ESP32, etc) but the support for using CJK fonts on Micropython is not wide spread, and the learning curve for C is too steep for me to go the traditional route.
The initial device will use a Raspberry Pi (currently a 3a+ model) running raspbian with cobbled together touchscreen and keyboard. The device will be portable and battery powered by a Li-Ion Polymer battery. All software will be offline. Exactly how much functionality to include is currently undecided.
- Create to do
熊