CLKD is a newly-released program for learning the meanings of Chinese/Japanese characters (kanji) by means of repeated tests. It is developed using CLISP, and runs on GNU/Linux and on MS Windows under Cygwin. CLKD uses a web browser as its interface. (These work best: Firefox 1.0.4 or newer; or Internet Explorer 7 or newer). Japanese fonts are required.
CLKD is not intended for complete beginners in Japanese or Chinese to just start learning characters by rote. It's best to learn something about the structure of these characters by reading a few good books about them. It helps to know how to write them, how to count strokes, and how to look up characters in dictionaries which classify them by radical and components. But all these resources still leave a big task: the raw memorization of hundreds and hundreds of characters. That is where a tool like CLKD becomes valuable.
CLKD is ideally suited to someone who has already broken through the unfamiliarity barrier: the student who can already recognize familiar components in an unfamiliar character and mentally form a mnemonic to which he or she can anchor the meanings of that character, and who is ready to begin internalizing a large number of characters.
This is what the CLKD user interface looks like, in Firefox 1.0.4 on Fedora Core 4 Linux.
CLKD is versioned with Meta-CVS (which itself is coming soon to common-lisp.net).
The program is packaged as a .tar.gz file. To build, you unpack
it, run configure (perhaps from a separate build directory) and make
install.
The result is an executable called clkd which contains an
embedded web server. You run clkd and then point your browser
to a URL.
Look here.
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