Learn by Novels

I’m sure a lot of you know about the game of go. Now inserting a decent simulator in a game is doable yet it will only be a challenge for beginners due to the mathematical difficulty of this game (way worse that chess).

But here what I was thinking on using it in Learn by Novels. Let’s assume that your character ends up in a game of go for some reason (easy enough to find a reason in our context).  What can you learn language wise with the game of go? Suppose a tutorial of the game:

• Numbers to a certain extent.
• How to explain, how to understand someone who tutors you.
• Condition and consequences.
• The game of go itself.
• A certain understanding of the tradition of go and its terms (which can be used in japanese idioms)

There’s a lot more that we can find if we look into it. Designing it can to be fun and efficient can be a lot of work though.

Such features are being considered for Learn by Novels but how much of a priority it should be is still up for debate.

Your thoughts?

Hmm… My most creative moments seem to be the most idle ones. I was daydreaming back at the start of the week, and I was hit by a sudden surge of litteral creation.

The tutorial / introduction part is well on and just enough cheesy. In it, we introduce a cheerful guide to welcome our hapless protagonist in the Empire of the Rising Sun. As a bonus, we even have two flashbacks about a pair of mysterious, and not quite in touch with reality, girls.

Midterms really are a pain v_v…

I finally got my camera back!

The pictures are on my Deviant account.

Time to post about “serious” business: the tools we will use to build the first Learn by Novels prototype.

The development will be centered around the Ren’Py engine. Documentation and forum lurking gave us a preliminary feel of this software. After some testing and scrap projects, we realized that we have some specific needs that Ren’Py can not do natively. This means I will have to dive into an existing project and create some new features, something I have never done before.

With a more pragmatic approach, we will forget that we ever thought about these extensions, and concentrate on the main storyline. Brainstorms abound, and we have settled on a stable character cast (including a mysterious Finnish metalhead girl).

We hope to get the prototype out in a few weeks. As we are both university students, midterm exams can be very treacherous and sneaky, appearing out of nowhere and slash wildly at you with dirty questions (well, maybe I am overdramatizing it, but you get the gist). Development will be slowed, but we will the project alive.

Last weekend was a collection of first times for me. Two friends and I travelled to Gatineau to visit the Ganime convention.

A small but quite animated floor in the Palais des Congrès awaited us, Saturday morning. I did not have much contact with cosplayers beforehand, much less any convention of any genre. I am a Linux guy, used to small informal meetings and install-fests. Even if Ganime isn’t the biggest anime assembly, its size captivated me. I was surrounded by great costumes, activities and panels. Needless to say, we had a great time! What I enjoyed most was the Mime an Anime (try to say that 5 times in a row…) panel.

As for pictures, I forgot my camera in friend’s car. I will try to fill a gallery this week, so expect a post around next Saturday.

Other conventions scheduled this year in Quebec Province include the renowned Montreal Otakuthon (August 13 to 15). Still in planning, we will get a con nowhere else than Quebec City for the first time ^^. I will write another post when more details will be settled.

To celebrate the new release of Kanji Box (and to keep this blog alive ¬_¬…), here is a small primer on this nifty web application and its dreadful content.

Kanjis (漢字), which are a japanified version of the Chinese characters, are renowned for their complexity. Japanese students learn the Jōyō character set in grade school. This set of 1945 characters is mandated by the government. For foreigners which want to ascertain their Japanese language command, there exist the Japanese Lanaguage Proficiency Test (JLPT). The latter is split in 4 levels, and cover about 300 more kanjis than the jōyō ones, among other language aspects.

There exist several kanji web apps to aid in learning them. My personal favorite persists to be Kanji Box. Initially, it was an integrated Facebook application. You still need a Facebook account to use it, but now it stands alone on its own domain. You can also run it on your iPhone!

The Kanji Box main mode is the kanji drill. You get a selection of characters, a definition, and you must click on the right kanji. The application keeps track of your progress, displaying in a coloured bar how many characters you have mastered, how much left you need to learn, etc. It separates each grade of kanjis in its own drill, so you can concentrate on the 80 first year ones, for example.

You also get quick fire quizzes, vocabulary drills, reading skills tests, and public stats so you can brag your results to your friends.

All in all, it is an essential learning tool. It covers the kanji subject in a straightforward manner, helping you progress at your own rhythm. As a final word, 習って！(Go learn!)

Hello everyone and welcome to our nifty project! Learn by Novels is a new approach to language learning. We will refresh educative gaming by combining language and visual novels together. To those familiar with the latter concept, the link with Japanese is easy to make!

I will be your main developer, hacking and tweaking and adding wear and tear on dextrous fingers. Along the project build-up, you will get some news about the Python language (a favourite of mine), Japanese culture and other random stuff.

By the way, if you have comments, suggestions or just want to beta-test something new, drop a comment!

Hope to meat you soon,

Alexandre