Just wanted to share with you all one of the best things I've ever brought that has helped me with my kanji study.

Originally I brought my Bamboo Tablet from Wacom (around 8000 yen) to draw graphics on my PC (a tablet is a computer 'pen' you can use to draw with). Turns out I wasn't very good a drawing with it - and I never have time to practice with it - but the thing is great to practice kanji on.

I use it to practice with, and also to write kanji that I don't know the furigana for - just write the kanji and it will be entered into your document or whatever.

It's very handy and I strongly recommend it for anyone who regularly has to fumble with looking up new kanji.

Cheers,
Sam.

I bought one of these just for Kanji practice (so I wouldn't have to fumble with pen and paper). I'm very happy with mine.

I have a Tablet PC and it's great for my anki reps

nac_est Wrote:I have a Tablet PC and it's great for my anki reps

I use a Tablet PC as well, and when I was trying RTK, it was invaluable. Being able to draw, see it right under the pen, and then have the character recognized (or not) is very, very nice.

A digitizer (wacom drawing tablet) is nice, but there's a disconnect between what you're hand is doing, and what appears on the screen. You lose a little bit when you have to do it like that.

I eagerly await the day cheap Cintiq-style digitizers are released to the market. They would cost around $400-500 for small 6-9" ones, I imagine, at today's prices. Heck, my Tablet PC started at $900. (I upgraded it from there, though.)

I'm patiently waiting for http://gigazine.net/index.php?/news/comm...eeepc_t91/

I've been using a bamboo for months now for scribbling kanji, and love it. I don't have a tablet pc, but I downloaded this little app: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysin...97434.aspx

I set it up so that I just press one of the function buttons on my bamboo, and then i can scribble all over my screen. Then I double click one of the buttons on my pen to erase it.

Does anyone know if you can use a Wacom Bamboo to write kanji into a text document? Something like Mazec but for the computer? Thanks.

tashippy Wrote:Does anyone know if you can use a Wacom Bamboo to write kanji into a text document? Something like Mazec but for the computer? Thanks.

Yes you can, I used to do that on Windows 7 with the Tablet PC Input Panel.

Well, I got tablet input mode up and running on my Windows virtual machine. Is there really no Japanese tablet input method for Mac? Wasn't this an option on past Mac OS's?
I've been looking at this http://www.justsystems.com/jp/products/a...atokwebcom but I can't figure out if it actually has handwriting recognition or just IME.
I mostly want to do this because inputting all of the vocab i get from reading books on a touch screen with mazec hurts my hand even with a stylus.
How do other learners find words with kanji whose pronunciation they know not? Kanji by radical? Traditional paper dictionary?

tashippy Wrote:How do other learners find words with kanji whose pronunciation they know not? Kanji by radical? Traditional paper dictionary?

I do it by radical. jisho.org usually.

I use the bamboo tablet, or even my mouse if away from my desk, and the Microsoft IME Pad and paste into http://www.edrdg.org/cgi-bin/wwwjdic/wwwjdic?1B (Jim Breen's kanjidic website).

tashippy Wrote:Well, I got tablet input mode up and running on my Windows virtual machine. Is there really no Japanese tablet input method for Mac? Wasn't this an option on past Mac OS's?

OS X doesn't have anything like the Tablet PC Input Panel on Windows 7 or the Mazec you mentioned; what it does have is a system for entering Chinese characters with a multi-touch trackpad or the Magic Trackpad, but it doesn't work with the Bamboo and it's really only for Chinese and not Japanese, although some people use it as a hack for entering kanji. It looks like this:


(source)

If you're ok with entering each character individually, there are some IME's where you can do that with the Bamboo tablet or a mouse, such as the Google IME:



The dev version has cloud-based lookup, which is extremely accurate; there's also a Mac OS version, which should probably have the same feature. It's not as fun to write this way, but in my opinion it's better and faster than searching each kanji by radical.

About your other question, I only read on a PC (not a fan of paper), so it's easy. If it's an unselectable text, such as a scan, I use KanjiTomo to OCR the word, and if it doesn't get recognized properly I handwrite it with the Bamboo.

Nothing seems to merge all of the features I desire just so. I guess I'll use the Google IME with it's copy-to-clipboard one kanji at a time. Why not whole words!? Why?!

I didn't see this thread before: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6407

Well that didn't last (Google IME Handwriting).
I couldn't even get 通 to come out right. Neither could my native Japanese friend.

Check this out:

http://adonit.net/jot/classic/

Seems promising.

tashippy Wrote:Well that didn't last (Google IME Handwriting).
I couldn't even get 通 to come out right. Neither could my native Japanese friend.

It came out right in my first try, with the ugliest handwriting ever, using the Cloud lookup (the Local one's accuracy is atrocious). Look:



In case you didn't try the dev version, this is the link for the Mac:
Google IME: Dev version for Mac
Just ignore the menacing warnings in the download page, and remember to select Cloud in that combo box that appears on top of the box where you handwrite the kanji.

Haha. Thanks Gdaxe

If I had the capability to post a screenshot to the thread, you could see my success.