Kanji Hunter is a program intended to help people learn Japanese. It is written in Java/Swing, and should run equally well on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux computers.
Note: Kanji Hunter uses the Taka database for much of its data. You can read more about Taka here.
Kanji Hunter is a quiz program to help you study the Japanese kanji characters. It is not intended to be a replacement for a textbook or curriculum, but it can be a valuable tool in conjunction with other learning resources.
When you begin, all the kanji are "on the loose"—it is your mission, as the Kanji Hunter, to subdue these renegade kanji and capture them. As you begin hunting, you will see new kanji and be prompted for one of their readings. If you do not know the on or kun reading for the particular kanji, simply hit "enter"—all the readings (plus some other information) will be shown to you.
If, in a particular round, you successfully type in the correct reading for a kanji character every time, with no mistakes, that kanji will be "captured" (or learned)—but only temporarily! After a certain amount of time (minutes, hours, or days), the kanji will "escape" and will re-appear in a future hunting round. If you continue to get the readings correct, that kanji will escape less and less frequently. If, however, you get it wrong, that kanji will appear more often.
Make sure to go kanji hunting on a regular basis. If you wait for several days between sessions, you may find that all your kanji have escaped!
Simply download and unzip the program. Inside the resulting folder will be a JAR file called "KanjiHunter-0.5". In Windows or OS X, simply double-click on the JAR file. In Linux, assuming you have Java installed, you can run Kanji Hunter from the command line like this: java -jar KanjiHunter-0.5.jar
Most likely! I’m looking for feedback on this project and I want to know what features will be most helpful to other people who are learning Japanese. So if one of the above-listed "future features" is something you really want, or you have something in mind that’s not on the list, drop me a line!
The easiest way is by email: rosswerner [at] users [dot] sourceforge [dot] net. Alternatively, the Accha project page has several forums available for people to use:
It is! Kanji Hunter is licensed under the GPL. The JAR file that you download contains all the source files required to compile Kanji Hunter. Simply unzip it with WinZip or any other utility that handles zip files (you may have to change the file extension to ".zip").
Alternatively, you can get the code out of CVS. Instructions on how to do this can be found here: http://sourceforge.net/cvs/?group_id=151211.