Barts News

As you probably remember, I have been living and working in Japan (you can read more about it here). For me this was a realisation of one of my biggest dreams, as since childhood I have been fascinated by Japan's culture and history. And yes, it has all begun long before I started to watch anime, thank you very much for asking.

I have to admit that my Japanese language skills deteriorate way too fast, now that I can't practise it on the regular basis. I have been trying to remedy it (books, internet), but now I have found a perfect way to do that.

Developper SammyFX has published a final version of his homebrew program called PSP Kanji (here is a link to its SourceForge page). It is an excellent tool that can be used to learn, practise and revise Kanji.


You can scroll through Kanji, add your own, you can either learn new ones or try a quiz that checks your Kanji knowledge. Taking into account that for the lowest (fourth) level of Japanese Language Proficiency Test you need to know 100 Kanji, this application might come in handy.


As an additional bonus the Katakana and Hiragana charts are included, which I personally consider a great advantage, especially since the pronunciation of Kanji are written in Hiragana (also a nice touch). Also, the program is very aesthetically looking, with pretty background, delicate colour scheme and elegant blending effects when scrolling through Kanji.

All in all, being a PSP freak as well as very Japan-oriented gai-jin, I have to heartily recommend this application to anyone even remotely interested in studying Japanese. It is really a great program - good job, Sammy!

PS. There also exists a Windows version of the application, which you can find in the download section of the SourceForge project.