Kotoba - Finally!
written by Stuart on February 1st, 2006
Since moving over to Mac a while back, the one thing I've missed more than anything else is the plethora of freeware programs out there for people who are studying Japanese. From fully blown Word Processors, to dictionaries and drill tools, there are a lot of them available on the windows platform. Until now I have not been able to find anything equally as impressive on the mac, but today I came across an application called Kotoba.
Kotoba is basically a flash card program, presenting you with a kanji character, before revealing the japanese reading, and then an English gloss. The absolute number one, killer feature however, is the availability of dictionary files which you can import into the application. It just so happens that the Kanji textbook used in my university, 'Basic Kanji' is amongst those listed on the site, meaning that I can load in specific chapters of the book and learn the kanji as we move along in lectures.
The best way to nailing Kanji, certainly in my limited experience, and from that of my friends, is through drills and recital, and with an application like this to compliment my physical kanji flash cards, I can build up a method of studying which suits me.
If you too want to get your hands on Kotoba, you can get it for free from the link below. It would appear that it hasn't been updated for sometime, but it works perfectly under the tiger. Oh, and this is mac only folks.
Nice find! I’m going to give it a try..
You might want to try searching ‘Japanese’ on mac.softpedia.com
It comes up with quite a few freeware Japanese language programs.
Thanks Omega, I’ll give that a go