Le blog à Thias

And now, a quick trackback to someone using Kiki's Kanji Dictinoary in their blog. Matthias Wiesmann, a postdoctoral fellow at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, uses Kiki in his blog to help study kanji. His blog is en Français, so you can learn two langauges at once ;)

gyousyo, sousyo, kaisyo

kanko' has posted some nice calligraphy to the flickr kanji group:

a sign outside a temple

Some very nice kanji collected as a flickr set by Y2C.

kanji on flickr

I've started a Kanji Group on flickr.com. Can you believe nobody thought of that already? There are lots of great photographs of kanji in action.

Sadly, I can't include an example here in the blog. Maybe it's time for Kiki to move off of Blogger.

四字熟語

Recently I've been looking for 四字熟語 (よじじゅくご yoji jyukugo) or "four character sayings." These came from China, and the Japanese adopted them along with their writing system. They are proverbs or sayings that fit (with some poetic license, it seems) into four kanji, usually in two pairs.

The best site I've found so far is The Four Character Sayings English Translation Dictionary. The index (in Japanese) points into two pages of yojijyukugo with English translations.

Here's an eample: 無念無想 Can you tell what it means? The characters point back into Kiki's Dictionary.

To be free from all distracting thoughts. Pretty cool, huh?

Kiki catches up on her mail

Thanks for writing, everyone.

If you wrote to the old email address on nuthatch.com, you probably never got a response. That's because it was lost in the thousands of junk emails I was receiving every day. I had no idea Kiki had such diverse interests!

Kiki now has a new mailing address. I've written back about a dozen people who I could find who had written since last March. I may post common questions and interesting letters, with your permission, to this blog.

Kiki's Kanji Blog

Beta 1 Posted Wed Jun 23 16:30:15 JST 1999

That's what it says at the foot of Kiki's Kanji Dictionary. I wrote a small Java program to parse Jim Breen's EDICT and KDICT files and emit the HTML Kanji Dictionary while living in Sendai, Japan. And now nearly six years have passed.

Kiki's been very busy. About 3,000 people visit every day. And nowadays Kiki is in good company. There are lots of cool and interesting resources available on the web for learning Japanese. So I'm starting this blog to keep track of what's new in the online Kanji world.

If not climbing, we can all continue clawing at the "Kanji Wall" together.