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.

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'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/sysi … 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Haha. Thanks Gdaxe

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

Last edited by tashippy (2013 April 23, 11:03 am)