Furigana

Furigana is a Japanese reading aid for Kanji, which originally came from Chinese.

There are many implementations like this for inserting Furigana into Japanese text on the web through ruby formatting, but in this post we will cover the Anki format.

Anki’s Furigana Format

Anki’s Furigana format is more readable and shorter, making editing easier as well as saving disk space. It’s used on Anki but it’s quite straightforward to convert it to the ruby format for the web.

Here are the examples for 辞たい and 辿り着つく:

Ruby format: <ruby><rb>辞</rb><rt>や</rt>めたい</ruby>
Anki format: 辞[や]めたい

Ruby format: <ruby><rb>辿</rb><rt>たど</rt>り</ruby><ruby><rb>着</rb><rt>つ</rt>く</ruby>
Anki format: 辿[たど]り 着[つ]く

Currently the two…

Background

Google Analytics is free but there have been privacy concerns over the handling of user data. Zoom was recently fined 85 million for misleading users about their Google and Facebook trackers.

With ad blocks and tracking prevention built right into browsers like Safari, I decided to self host my own analytics platform, and this story is going to show how you can do it too.

I recently moved my website https://www.immersionkit.com from Vercel to Netlify because I reached the image edge optimization limit on Vercel.

Background

Apparently, there is a limit of 1000 image optimization processes per month on Vercel, something that is counted whenever you access an image being handled by next/image. You can’t see your usage currently, so you won’t know when you have reached your limit until they shut down your account and send you a friendly email.

After a short email exchange I deleted the app on Vercel and they nicely reactivated my account.

From my experience so far, such limits aren’t…

Do you need to…

• get a popup dictionary on Mac?
• record audio and take screenshots with ShareX to build your sentence cards in Anki?
• OCR text on a screen selection like Capture2Text?

You can do these on your Mac without external programs.

Welcome to MacOS and everything that’s already on your machine.

Welcome to MacOS

With the introduction of affordable yet insanely capable M1 Macbooks and iMacs, there has been an influx of people who decided to make the switch to MacOS. …

I like the plug and play experience. Recently, I developed a desktop app for people to learn Japanese, but it required MacOS users to first install brew and tesseract. It may not seem much effort to developers, but these extra steps could detract the user experience and make it less accessible.

On Windows, it is easy to compile the entire Tesseract into one exe file and all I did was copy a compiled Tesseract.exe from another Github repo (Probably not the safest idea).

On Mac, I have tried rebuilding all the separate dependencies and Tesseract but to no avail. I…

The Power of Immersive Learning

Back in 2017 when I completed Persona 5 in Japanese, I was blown away at how many Japanese expressions I learned throughout the game. My speed in skimming through in-game dialog and text also improved noticeably.

A lot of people use language exchange apps like HelloTalk to talk to Japanese people, but I prefer playing games and talking casually with Japanese people. It’s completely free, less awkward, and you don’t have to teach them English in return.

Find multiplayer games with an active player base

Go to openrec.tv and look at the most streamed multiplayer games. Dead by daylight, Apex Legends, Among Us, Splatoon 2. Monster Hunter is also pretty active on Twitter. Personally I have only played Apex and Splatoon 2 with other Japanese players but your interests may vary.

Create a Japanese Twitter account

This is super important. A new Japanese twitter account without a single latin…

Install AltStore on Your Computer

On your Mac/PC, install AltStore.

Once AltStore is installed, you will see a diamond shaped icon on the top right of your activity ray (bottom right for Windows).

Connect your phone to your computer with a cable. Click on the diamond shaped icon and install AltStore on your phone.