KanjiList

Project Summary

KanjiList is a command line program meant to read Japanese text as an input and output a list of kanji words that appear in the input text along with their respective meanings, readings, etc. The data for words comes from the JMdict Project, the KANJIDIC Project, and the JMnedict Project.

The intended users of this program are Japanese language learners that are barred from reading Japanese text such as news articles because of a lack in kanji skills.

How To Use

By running kanjilist.py, the user will be prompted to provide preferences for what the output text should include and indicate from where the program will get text input. Currently, the user can read in a text file and output a text file in the same directory containing the output text (see samples), or the user can copy text onto their clipboard, run the program, and the output text will then be copied onto the clipboard and outputted to the terminal.

Output Preferences

JLPT

The user will be prompted to indicate what JLPT level will be used to filter out kanji words. Kanji are ranked from levels 1 through 5 depending on their frequency and how early one is expected to know it. The higher the rank, the 'easier' the kanji is. If the user selects level 5, all kanji will be included in the output. If the user selects 3, all individual kanji ranked 1 to 3 will be included as well as any compounds where the rounded mean of its individual components' JLPT is ranked 1 to 3. An extra option 0 is included to create output texts for kanji that are so uncommon that they are not ranked by the JLPT system.

For a detailed explanation for how JLPT filtering works.

Other Kanji Information

The user has the ability to change what information will be including in the final output. The user can choose to include/not include: meainings, readings, nanori, frequency, and JLPT. The default is set so that only meanings and readings will be outputted.

License Information

This program would not be possible without the JMdict, JMnedict, and KANJIDIC projects as all data in the json dictionaries of this project is extracted and adapted from them. Licensing information regarding the JMdict and KANJIDIC projects can be found here.