Hello, my name is Tyler, and I put this section here to give the user some background on this project. I created this website as an year-long Japanese 4 Project. My intent was to create a way for students to review Japanese at home. I thought Flash was the most practical tool to do this, as about 98% of internet users today have the Flash plug-in. Therefore, almost anyone should be able to take these quizzes. As far as I know, this project is unique. Most other Japanese quiz sites have multiple options, a,b,c, and d. The user can just guess and get it right. In this project, one would have to be an extremelygood guesser to get the right answer without knowing the 漢字.

While creating this project I ran into numerous complications. The first problem was inputting Japanese text into Flash. The only way I have found for the user to input Japanese into the swf file was if they were on a Japanese Computer, running a Japanese version of windows, with a Japanese version of shockwave player. Seeing as how that was not a practical solution, and spending endless hours searching forums looking for another answer, romaji input was the only option left. This choice created another problem--different schools teach different systems of writing romaji. Because I wanted to make this project accessible to as many people as possible, and not just the people in our program, I made a table displaying the system I used to make it. Next, I had to learn how to write the script for Flash which would check the user input against what I coded in. This coding would affect the user's score. One other thing which really was not a problem but just time consuming was getting the 漢字 into Flash. The most reasonable way to do this was to type the 漢字 into MS Word, screen capture it, and then bring it into Adobe Photoshop and edit/crop it there.

I stopped after I finished the first year 漢字 sheets. My plan is to teach my teacher Hall 先生 how I created the first ones. So if the first couple quizzes are a bit buggy, give him some time--he is learning, it took me a year to learn and do all of these and I had some experience.

I hope this helps future Japanese students in their studies. Please let others students know about this site. I created it for all Japanese students!

さようなら