A script to produce a piece of HTML showing kanji of the day and some information about it.
This project is a script that takes a list of kanji as input and outputs a file that can be used to generate a bit of HTML for a "kanji of the day" setup in an RSS feed or blog post.
Kanji are Japanese characters. There are several thousand in existence. If you want to learn them, you should study in many ways. A daily script such as this is a tool to buttress whatever other study methods you already have. If you're already doing reading practice, it's sometimes helpful to focus on a single character and see some common words that make use of the the character.
To see this code in action, visit https://kotd.dperkins.org/ or https://c.im/@kanjioftheday. If those sites do what you want, feel free to use them as-is.
Most kanji study websites are closed source. You don't get to decide on information or formatting. If their site goes down or starts pushing heavy commercials, there's nothing to be done about it. In contrast, this project gives you as much control as you want.
- Download the source code into a directory of your choosing.
- Ruby is required. Version 3.1.2 or newer should work.
- If you want to post to Mastodon, get toot working with your target account.
- Run
dictionaries/update_dictionaries.shto get the required dictionary files. Some of the dictionary files are Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licensed, so they aren't bundled here. - Next, run
generator.sh. This could take a minute or two. It compiles all of the dictionaries, kanji, and examples into quickly-usable text files.
The above two scripts only need to be run on first installation or when you want to update the backend data.
Run web/random.rb. This creates or updates each RSS feed. If you don't want to generate all of the available feeds, edit the file accordingly. To do this daily, make a cronjob.
@daily /usr/bin/ruby /path/to/script/random.rb
Run that for a few days to make sure it works, and then disable the output.
@daily /usr/bin/ruby /path/to/script/random.rb > /dev/null
Run web/mastodon.rb. This posts to the Mastodon account you've already configured in toot. To do this daily, make a cronjob.
@daily /usr/bin/ruby /path/to/script/mastodon.rb
Run that for a few days to make sure it works, and then disable the output.
@daily /usr/bin/ruby /path/to/script/random.rb > /dev/null
The script generator.rb looks for target kanji in the file targetkanji.txt and produces a tab-separated details file called details.txt. The format of details.txt is a tab-delimited UTF-8 text file. The columns are:
- Literal
- Strokes
- Grade
- Meanings
- Onyomis
- Kunyomis
- Examples
This project comes with some lists of kanji in the lists directory. You can copy and paste those onto targetkanji.txt as desired. If you'd like to use a different set of kanji, modify targetkanji.txt by hand. For convenience, the script generator.sh generates details files for all of the elementary and junior high school kanji lists and places the results in web.
- https://github.com/dper/kanjioftheday/. The source code.
- https://dperkins.org/. The author's website.
- https://c.im/@dperkins. The author's Mastodon account.
This code was originally forked from kanjiforanki, a 2011 project to create paper flashcards.
- http://www.mext.go.jp/a_menu/shotou/new-cs/youryou/syo/koku/001.htm. Elementary school kanji.
- http://www.imabi.net/joyokanjilist.htm. Elementary and junior high school kanji.
- http://nihongo.monash.edu/japanese.html. The dictionaries are available from their original sources.
The JLPT kanji lists are based on those from the old official JLPT documentation. When last checked, there are no current official lists for some levels, but as best we can tell, the old lists give us a reasonable approximation of what to find where.
Thanks to jfsantos for the regular expressions that remove hiragana and katakana.