Ruby characters for the lesson transcripts?

[auntie68]

Hello! This is Auntie. I love (love! love!) JapanesePod101, including the team as well as the poddies who have taught me so much in the BB. Thank you!

My question is: Have Peter and the team ever received a request for ruby characters in the "kanji" version of the lesson transcripts? What do other users think about that?

I know that ruby characters could make the text look a bit cluttered. But those little things make it so much easier to read the kanji.

Although I can always look it up in the following, "hiragana" section, the thing is that I am no longer used to reading things written purely in hiragana. So it's a bit weird and clunky for me to skim through the hiragana in order to the find the word I am looking for. I can't speak for other learners, but after a certain point kanji actually helps me to read faster because the "meaning" part is more clearly separated from the grammar part (eg., "-mashoo", "-masu", "-tte" etc)

Will you please consider this request from me?

Cheers,
Auntie

[JohnCBriggs]

Auntieさん
Ruby characters would be cool. I don't see these very often in webpages though. I wonder if they are hard to do. Also, is display of Ruby characters standard in Firefox or do you need a plug-in.
Personally, I rely on Rikaichan to get through the kanji transcript.
ジョン

[JonB]

What is a ruby character? Never heard of that one

[JohnCBriggs]

Ruby characters are small hiragana characters placed above kanji characters so you know how to read them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_characters

Test your browser here
http://www.w3.org/International/tests/s ... kup-1.html

[annie]

Ruby characters are small hiragana characters placed above kanji characters so you know how to read them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_characters

Test your browser here
http://www.w3.org/International/tests/s ... kup-1.html

might be better to call them furigana though.
I'd never heard them called ruby characters until very recently.

[JohnCBriggs]

Annieさん,
Right, they are furigana. But not everyone knows what that is either. Somehow for this webstuff, the correct term is Ruby. I don't know why.
Anyway, there are many educational books that use furigana/Ruby, like "Japanese for Busy People". It does seem like a natural thing for JPOD to do. But, I think it is probably a lot more work and FireFox doesn't seem to support it yet. Fortunately IE does support Ruby.
I would love to see Ruby characters on JPOD.
Thanks
John C. Briggs

P.S. I found a Ruby plug-in for Firefox.
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1935/

[Tom]

I had no idea what you were talking about until someone called it furigana.

[auntie68]

Dear BB elders, yes, the ruby characters I was referring to are called "furigana" in Japanese. I guess I used the term "ruby characters" because it can apply to both Japanese and Chinese!

Peter-san and team, do please consider this, if only for the PDFs. Once one gets to about lower-intermediate level (and is basically pretty comfortable with "beginner"), reading a "hiragana translation" of the entire text feels a bit strange. The ruby characters in the "kanji" version really will help, because we will be able to take in the new characters without having to plough through the "hiragana" text, which I think that even Japanese people may find a bit unnatural.

Just my heartfelt request for the Year of the Golden Pig (Gong Hei Fatt Choy, all!) --

Regards,
Auntie

[Belton]

Right, they are furigana. But not everyone knows what that is either. Somehow for this webstuff, the correct term is Ruby. I don't know why.

IMHO furigana is probably the more exact term as it is a particular need of Japanese to use a gloss to explain a character. (especially as what we have in common here is Japanese rather than Chinese or XML markup. 笑）
The term ruby comes from the point size that was used to typeset furigana, ruby, which was 5 and a half points.

It'd be nice to have them in the pdfs I think.
I prefer it to kanji only or kana only. It would mean a lot more typesetting on jPod's part prehaps.
The furigana would have to be of a fairly large point size for useful on screen reading.


live furigana in webpages.
I'm a bit undecided. I'd prefer pop-up or tool-tip style to an inline over the word style. presumably with CSS it could be turned on and off. (as long as your browser supports the tag). Again a reasonable amount of extra work when writing and marking up the pages I think. I wouldn't like to go back and re-tag the site as a whole! Mostly I find rikachan or JEDict as usable a way to get readings for unknown kanji as I'd probably need the English as well if I don't recognise them.

[JonB]

I had no idea what you were talking about until someone called it furigana.

Thanks and I'll add my voice to the vote to have furigana/ruby above the kanji if possible. I find it an easier way to learn the kanji rather than have two texts - one in kanji and one in kana

Cheers
JonB

[Jason]

The problem with furigana is, like rouma-ji, it can easily become a crutch. As small as the lessons are and as limited as the kanji in them are, I really think furigana would be overkill. Plus, going in and adding the markup to all the lessons and furigana to the PDFs would be a MASSIVE job. I really think the team's time and effort would be much better spent on other things.

Another problem with Ruby in the browsers is that Ruby is not a standard part of web standards (yet). So some browsers support it, some don't, and some have unofficial and imperfect support through plugins (Firefox). Considering rikaichan already provides a very similar function beautifully without adding extra characters in the transcripts, adding ruby to the online lessons transcripts is really neither necessary or, IMHO, desirable.

Now if someone could just come up with a system wide rikaichan like program. There was a program for MacOS X that was supposed to do this, but I could never get it to work.

[JohnCBriggs]

Jasonさん,
The benefits of ruby characters are clear enough that they are a common feature of many published book both for young native Japanese and Japanese language learners. I have even seen furigana used for katakana characters in children's books. This is presumably because the children don't know katakana well. Furigana is widely used in the Japanese For Busy People series.

As for the crutch aspect, I don't really buy the argument here. I assume JPOD is already holding back on the use of kanji. So the kanji version of the transcripts are not written at the full adult level. We are already working on a sliding scale of complexity in the writing style, and furigana can be used in much the same way. For simpler kanji, the furigana can be ommited.
In fact, rather than simply being a crutch for kanji we should not, furigana can be used to introduce new kanji to the student. I think that for some of the complex kanji JPOD has simply written it in hiragana to avoid complexity. That is the real crutch.
Another way furigana could be used is to only present the furigana for the first occurance of a kanji in an article. This is how it is used in Japanese For Busy People. The first time they use a kanji on a page, it has furigana. After that it is omitted.
One more point, the furigana is so small, if at all possible, the reader will avoid using it.
Honestly the mixture of kanji-ban and hiragana-ban is really cumbersome. There should be a single transcript with ruby characters as needed.
Regarding the browser issue, since IE supports ruby characters, that is about 79.8% of the browser market right away. Firefox has a plug-in so that is about another 13.7%. So I think Ruby characters are here to stay.
I think there should be an attempt to incorporate ruby characters into new lower intermediate and intermediate lessons.
John

[auntie68]

The problem with furigana is, like rouma-ji, it can easily become a crutch. As small as the lessons are and as limited as the kanji in them are, I really think furigana would be overkill..

Thank you, JapanesePod101, for your answer re: ruby characters. You sound very firm in your decision, but I'd still like to turn the logic of what you wrote around: As small as the the lessons are, and as limited as the kanji in them are, one can also say that it's overkill to make your students plough through a hiragana "parallel" text in order to find these limited words that they are looking for. And even that process itself is inefficient and counter-intuitive, because instead of being able to skim from one familiar kanji to the next, I have to wade through groups of hiragana words that I normally never ever see written in that form in real life.

I never asked for ruby characters to be inserted -- retroactively -- into all previous pdfs, it would be great if they could be introduced in the manner that Johncbriggs suggested (thanks for the show of support!).

Thanks!

Auntie

[Jason]

Honestly the mixture of kanji-ban and hiragana-ban is really cumbersome. There should be a single transcript with ruby characters as needed.

Actually, I agree with you. I don't like the hiragana-ban, either.

Hmmmm....there *might* be a way to do it with the website. I'm not sure about the PDFs though. Keep your eyes peeled.

[Alcyone]

Jasonさん,

What was the name of the Mac OS X app you couldn't get to work? I'd like to give it a try if its Panther compatible.