KanjiVG – SVGs of Kanji character strokes including order, shape and direction

https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/

by pabs3 • 3 years ago

236 60 3 years ago

kanjivg.tagaini.net

It’s too bad the pitch data out there for Japanese is either proprietary or pirated without attribution

Another resource: https://github.com/CaptainDario/DaKanji-Single-Kanji-Recogni... someone made an interesting kanji recognition lib that hasn’t gotten attention

krackers2• 3 years ago

Given a large enough corpus of spoken lines, could you do some ML magic to get the pitch accents (maybe even just FFT and a simple classifier would do)? I'm aware that the "base" pitch accent does change in context so it's not quite trivial, but it seems like you could get pretty close?

Edit: Found https://mizoru.github.io/blog/2021/12/25/Japanese-pitch.html

wahnfrieden5• 3 years ago

The pitch variants are also highly regional but that’s an interesting idea. I wouldn’t want to give it to learners in use cases I can think of, when correct data is available though (just with licensing headaches/costs)

The correct data already exists, so I'm not sure what the point is besides having a less accurate but freer option

gfaure• 3 years ago

This linked article seems to have gotten special access to the data -- unfortunately only the resulting model is available.

rjh292• 3 years ago

It predates modern ML, but that's what Suzuki-kun does:

https://www.gavo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ojad/

rjh292• 3 years ago

It seems like most people use the NHK pitch accent dictionary (there are TSVs of it online). I don't feel like it's particularly "pirated" though, can you really pirate the way people actually pronounce words?

wahnfrieden5• 3 years ago

NHK didn’t give that data an open license

Piracy is rampant. Whether lifting and reusing/redistributing copyrighted dictionaries or other stud materials, or pirating ebook/cdrom type content. That’s nice, but as a legit service provider it’s less accessible without just giving users their own ability to side load in materials

kouteiheika• 3 years ago

It’s too bad the pitch data out there for Japanese is either proprietary or pirated without attribution

I have serious doubts whether this kind of data is even copyrightable, as long as you're not redistributing it verbatim.

A specific selection of words with pitch data (e.g. the NKH pitch dictionary) might be copyrightable as there was creative expression involved in picking which exact words to put into the dictionary and in what order. But the data itself? A 猫 is always going to have a HLL pitch accent (in the standard accent). That's a fact. And facts itself are not copyrightable.

You can't copyright a phone book[1]. Quoting from the case:

"Notwithstanding a valid copyright, a subsequent compiler remains free to use the facts contained in another's publication to aid in preparing a competing work, so long as the competing work does not feature the same selection and arrangement"

Sounds exactly like the pitch accent data dump that's been floating around which a lot of people use. (Not the verbatim NHK one; the other one.) They probably used the data from NHK's pitch dictionary to compile it along with a few other dictionaries. But does it feature the same selection and arrangement? Nope.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications%2C_Inc.%2C_....

wahnfrieden5• 3 years ago

I see apps pay to license data from https://www.cjk.org for pitch accent data. I don't know what their data looks like though. Maybe you're right and their business case for this data is essentially a scam, or there is non-factual copyrightable data, or the law is different in Japan, I don't know.

nathanwh2• 3 years ago

There's also a stroke order font which is used in the Anki deck I have for learning kanji. The svgs in the post look great, but as far as I can tell there's not an easy way to copy the actual kanji character (you can get it from the actual SVG source however). The font is nice because as far as the clipboard is concerned it's just the character.

https://www.nihilist.org.uk/

notpushkin• 3 years ago

It's generated from KanjiVG though: https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/projects.html

nathanwh2• 3 years ago

Oh interesting. I skimmed that page to make sure it wasn't already referenced and ironically didn't recognize that the kanji were the same as the link I posted. More practice needed I guess.

bmalicoat2• 3 years ago

KanjiVG is awesome. I used it for a free kanji app I made for iOS and Android. Figuring out how to write an SVG parser + renderer wasn't as tricky as I thought when I set out to do it. https://www.bjmalicoat.com/projects/kanjibook

huhtenberg2• 3 years ago

Very nice. I might even get a sticker :)

One thing that IMO is missing is the audio playback option for readings. This would've greatly facilitated remembering readings. AWS Polly is very easy to integrate with and it costs next to nothing. /nudge /nudge.

bmalicoat2• 3 years ago

Great suggestion. I couldn't find an audio source I liked. I'll take a look, thanks.

innocentoldguy• 3 years ago

KanjiVG is pretty cool. The color coding for radicals and stroke orders is nice. Also, parsing and using the SVGs is fairly straight forward.

Having owned a couple of books that had the stroke orders wrong while I was learning Japanese, I always check for mistakes in the stroke orders of kanji like 右 (right) and 左 (left) to make sure they're correct. KanjiVG gets it right.

On a tangentially related note, I recently purchased an iOS Japanese dictionary app called "Nihongo" (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nihongo-japanese-dictionary/id...) for my daughter because she wanted to study Japanese. I was just expecting a basic course, but it is probably the best vocabulary/kanji studying app I've ever used. It's a little pricey, but well worth it if you're trying to build a strong Japanese vocabulary or learning to read kanji. I have no affiliation with the people who make the app. I'm just an impressed buyer.

zxspectrum19822• 3 years ago

This looks very much like Make Me A Hanzi (MMAH), which is exactly the same (Chinese) characters. It's just that Japanese knows those as Kanji.

https://github.com/skishore/makemeahanzi

mananaysiempre• 3 years ago

(Caveat: there are a handful of cases where the Chinese and Japanese stroke orders differ, so take care treating these as equivalent.)

Dalewyn2• 3 years ago

This. Traditional Chinese and Japanese are two seemingly similar but distinctly different things (the latter is forked from the former).

Simplified Chinese is a whole different beast of corruption that is a fork of Traditional Chinese but otherwise not similar to either.

TacticalCoder• 3 years ago

This looks very much like Make Me A Hanzi (MMAH), which is exactly the same (Chinese) characters. It's just that Japanese knows those as Kanji.

Well "kanji" literally means "Han character".

fenomas• 3 years ago

Definitely not exactly the same. Kanji and Hanzi are two different character sets - they overlap a lot, but each has common everyday characters that aren't in the other, and sometimes the "same" character is in both sets but written differently in various languages (e.g. 骨).

qiqitori• 3 years ago

In case anyone is wondering why different glyphs have the same unicode code point, and how an app is supposed to decide which one to render... Well I don't know the reason for the first question actually, though many people appear to have some choice comments.

But as for the second question: for HTML documents, many tags have a lang attribute that decide which version of the glyph to render within that tag. Hacker News has lang="en", so it'll use a user setting to decide. For example, in Firefox' about:config, there's a setting called cjk_pref_fallback_order. If e.g. ja comes first, the little square inside the top square in 骨 is rendered on the right side, if any zh thing comes first, it's rendered on the left side.

emursebrian• 3 years ago

I used this in my Anki deck for John Heisig's Remembering the Kanji. The stroke ordering was helpful and it was animated with CSS. It's been a while, so I can't remember who to give credit to for the RTK deck or the CSS animations.

I also built a little tool that would expand out the Kanji character into its constituent radicals and Heisig primitives so I could at them to my study code.

At that time, I was reading NHK Web News Easy on a regular basis and wanted to study those characters with Heisig's visual approach.

esrh• 3 years ago

I also used this with anki, but i wanted some interactivity and practice actually physically writing stuff out combined with spaced rep.

Resulted in some pretty gnarly code using kanjivg, pygame and ankiconnect: https://github.com/eshrh/anki-kunren

tomodachi942• 3 years ago

Hmm, this reminds me of Jim Rose's stroke order diagram retrographer-editor[0] (SODER) from some time ago.

[0] https://archive.org/details/soder

bkbullock2• 3 years ago

That seems to have been uploaded on February 11 2023. I remember kanjicafe.com, which used to have a giant picture of Jim Rose's face for some reason. The site seems to have gone now.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040925183635/http://kanjicafe....

tomodachi942• 3 years ago

There's a bunch of 2000s-era Japanese content up at <http://ftp.edrdg.org/pub/Nihongo/00INDEX.html>; I've been uploading some it it to the Internet Archive. The GIF you mentioned is on there, as well as SODER.

dtgriscom• 3 years ago

I'd never really understood just how complex these characters can be. Sure, there's a lot going on at first glance, but seeing the stroke order and direction, and imagining the process, really hammers it home to this monolingual American.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

Why does stroke order matter? Is it to handle animating them and if each stroke isn’t the same colour?

Sorry but I don’t know much about these kinds of characters.

do_anh_tu• 3 years ago

Because when you handwriting, the stroke order is very important.

wingerlang• 3 years ago

Very important due to, tradition?

0xcde4c3db• 3 years ago

It's partly just that it's tradition, but there are also practical reasons:

1) Chinese characters are traditionally/historically written with a brush, not a modern pen or pencil. Because brushes don't create uniform lines, there is a connection between the specific series of movements and the final appearance of the character (sort of like calligraphy pens). Basically, inconsistent movements tend to produce inconsistent-looking characters, so an agreed-upon standard aids in legibility.

2) Various components (most notably the "radicals") reoccur across many characters. Having a (mostly) consistent set of rules for how each component is written and in which order aids memorization because you're not learning every new character "from scratch".

3) Stroke order affects how mechanically efficient it is to write the character, which can be a pretty big deal when some of the more complex characters are upwards of a dozen strokes.

pigsty• 3 years ago

One thing is balance. If you draw characters out of the typical stroke order, things will often look lopsided or have weird proportions. When written with the proper order, proportions look nicer.

For example, think about writing a capital A. It’ll look different if you draw the middle bar first or if you draw the outer two lines first. F will also look different depending on whether you draw the vertical line or one of the horizontal lines first. Try a Q with the little bottom dash before drawing the circle. It’s not only weird but more difficult.

The difference in these characters is subtle, but you can notice it with your own writing. Now instead of 3 strokes to write a character, imagine those with 15 or even 28 strokes. The odd balance and proportions have cascading effects.

TheDong2• 3 years ago

One thing not mentioned in other comments is that stroke order also helps with software that wants to do character recognition.

If, for example, you are taking handwritten notes on an ipad, and want software to convert the notes into text... well, knowing the order of strokes and having an agreed upon order helps considerably over just trying to match shapes.

Digital dictionaries also usually have a "handwritten input" mode to look up a character, and that mode will also recognize characters much more accurately when input with correct stroke order.

anonfunction• 3 years ago

I looked around and couldn't find any examples or demo of the SVGs on the website. This is the epitome of a project that would benefit from a visual representation.

lbotos• 3 years ago

https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/viewer.html?kanji=%E5%8B%95

nojs• 3 years ago

If anyone is looking for animated stroke orders for Chinese characters, Hanzi5 is by far the best resource [1]. I built a small app to make them searchable too [2].

1. http://www.hanzi5.com/

2. https://dragonmandarin.com

bkbullock2• 3 years ago

The above web site offers animated stroke orders, see the "animate" button on

https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/viewer.html

Credit for the project is at the bottom of the page.

TheDong2• 3 years ago

The originally posted website offers animated stroke order for japanese kanji, which is not necessarily the same as for chinese characters.

For example, enter 田 into both the original website (https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/viewer.html?kanji=%E7%94%B0) and hanzi5 (http://www.hanzi5.com/bishun/7530.html), and you'll see that the stroke order differs.

There are also several chinese characters which are not present in that japanese viewer, for example 厅

presentation• 3 years ago

I like the stroke orders for the romaji.

pancrufty• 3 years ago

IMHO it’s high time China and Japan went the enlightened Hangul way Korea took half a millennia ago. There’s no reason to keep to absurdity going any longer; even they don’t know how to type their own words and use pinyin as input. The Vietnamese way would also be easy with their explicit tones written on each vowel, however they lost the advantages that blocky characters offer.

mbwgh• 3 years ago

See also the linked projects (https://kanjivg.tagaini.net/projects.html), which seem like a valuable resource. I only looked at https://www.tanoshiijapanese.com/home/ and already thought this site is just insane with what it offers for free.

KanjiVG – SVGs of Kanji character strokes including order, shape and direction

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