Despite appearances, this is not a post about the Dance of the day. Tango (the a is pronounced like awning) means “word” in Japanese. So this is a post about the word of the day. A friend and I started a word of the day type thing to help us study Japanese. On Monday and Wednesday, she mails me five words (a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, and a freely chosen one), and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I mail her five. On Friday, we agreed that it would be the test day. Originally, we had planned that we would send each other some of the words at random, but after considering this for awhile, I felt that it was ineffective.

First, we’d have to look at the words in order to decide which ones to send. Then, we’re not getting tested on all the words. Lastly, this is the day and age of web-assign! If I can do physics homework online, I can sure as hell write some simple crap code to spit out 20 words a week from a database and check if I can type the right word. So, I’ve been spending all of my free time lately writing up the code for tangodujour.com (no idea if that domain is even available). (The following is pretty geeky. Feel free to stop reading now unless you’re a computer science major. CS’ers I kindly ask that you read on to the end or at least the last paragraph)

While writing it, I thought of all the studying and money spending I did to prepare for this big Japanese proficiency test. I’d searched a couple of times on the web for websites that offered free study help and the things I found were rather lacking (I felt, I mean, they were nice, but just not quite enough, a little simplistic and didn’t really test your knowledge). So, while writing tangodujour.com I decided I’d like to expand it and in compass more than just the words of the day, I’d love for it to be everything I wanted out of studying for the test, not just multiple choice radio buttons, but do you really know it text fields.

One problem with that, though, is that when testing it, you’ve really go just a 1 to 1 relationship. Is A = B? Yes? Then Correct! No? Then wrong. But in going from language to language, there’s not really a 1 to 1 relationship, which is why the babelfish-esq translators fail so poorly. For example, I told you that “tango” means “word”. But think about the word “word”. How many uses does it have? I can tell you, you’d be surprised. I know I was when I kept saying “tango” in places where it wasn’t the right word and would get funny looks. “I love the written word.” In that case, “tango” is incorrect. And as far as words go, “word” is pretty simple.

I’ve tried to side step that problem by having the questions asked in English and the answers in Japanese, because it’s currently directed at English speakers and we can tell the nuances in our words but not so much with Japanese words that we’re just learning. (I’ve also got the database set up to hold an example sentence to help out with the nuances, but it’s currently not used) I’ve also got it set up to contain an alternative English meaning, but even that, I feel, wouldn’t be enough to catch all of the possible synonyms. I’m thinking now of feeding a lengthy list of synonyms separated by 0 and then exploding the 0 out.

Anyway, I’ve got the site running to the needs of my friend and myself, but I still would really like it to be utilized by anyone wanting a study aid for Japanese. I feel that I can reasonably code everything that I would need for it, however, I am not a comp sci major and know absolutely nothing about security. There’s probably 50million holes and potential errors due to poor coding, so I would like to ask one of my CS friends (that actually read this and has time) to help me and proof my code. I’m not asking for writing, just proofing and maybe a pointer or two (like wow, your code sucks). Anyway, if you don’t mind and can do it, send my a mail or an IM.

Brian Schuch