all-languages | Thomas' Work Space

How to display Furigana phonetic guide for Japanese Kanji in MS-Word 2010

2012/02/21 plagwitz 1 comment

Furigana uses Kana (usually Hiragana) to phonetically transcribe Kanji, above (for horizontally written Kanji) or to the right (if in vertical writing mode), for special characters or audiences (children and second language learners).
In MS-Office, if you have a Japanese Input Method Editor selected in MS-Windows, select some Kanji and in the ribbon, under tab: home, section: font; click on the Phonetic guide, to bring up a dialogue that attempts to auto detect the furigana.
You can make adjustments there, click “OK “to insert. Like so:

2012/02/20 plagwitz Enter your password to view comments.

2012/02/16 plagwitz Leave a comment

Go to Google translate and do like so. Useful for learning, as well as typing when teaching.

2012/02/10 plagwitz Leave a comment

Wish my Latin teacher at home would have had such a nice tool when he analyzed the “Ante mare et terras et quod tegit omnia caelum / unus erat toto naturae vultus in orbe / quem dixere chaos”, he had only me:
Now how could such exercise creation made more automated by having it accept the output of NLP tools like Treetagger?

2012/02/08 plagwitz Leave a comment

2012/02/05 plagwitz Leave a comment

Here are two screencasts of my presentation:
one for the right screen/participant screen (using the Study1200 teacher to student screen casting). Requires Windows Media Player on PC, like in the LRC: download from MS-SkyDrive.
one for the left screen/projector, where I displayed mostly a PowerPoint. You can watch this in parallel using another player, e.g. the VLC player, like in the LRC. However, it can also stream from MS-SkyDrive.

2012/02/04 plagwitz 2 comments

Our small group work spaces each now have a Wacom Bamboo drawing tablet installed.
You can use these tablets in conjunction with the Windows XP writing pad IME to input Mandarin/Kanji character strokes and receive autosuggest options you can pick you character from which make not only writing faster, but also reward you for remembering your characters, expose you to more and help you identify the correct one from a list of options.
Here is what the Windows XP writing pad IME and Wacom tablet looks like in action: (behind the pen: our Japanese tutor).
Here is how to access Windows XP Japanese IME keyboard and handwriting:
1. Open the application you want to write in, e.g. MS Word (the language input option is specific to the current window and defaults to”English-US international” in the LRC if you open a new window).
2. In the taskbar, in the language toolbar section, select Japanese or Chinese or Korean.
3. If only the language identifier is showing in the language toolbar, right-click on it and choose “Show additional icons”
4. Select as input method for the chosen language from icon “Options” or “Tools”” , the “IME pad” / “Handwriting”
5. Prerequisites