Obenkyobo: An application to help you learn japanese ?

[Aramir]

Obenkyobo, An application to help you learn japanese

What is it then?

Obenkyobo is an application for kyobo eReaders designed to help you memorize Hiraganas, Katakanas, Kanjis, etc. It should in theory be fully compatible with any Kyobo eReader (please report result on your device). This is only meant to be a learning aid that I'm dogfooding. I'm in no way a professional japanese teacher, therefore if you spot an error please report it to me ASAP.

It features :

• Hiragana/Katakana <-> Romanji (and vice versa) customizable MCQ
• Vocabulary(Kanji/Romanji) <-> Romanji (and vice versa) customizable MCQ
• Vocabulary sheet system (create your owns sheets, hide columns, hide cells, randomize content, change number of row per page, etc)
• Weighted random / "Learning Score" System to keep MCQ more entertaining/efficient
• Quality of Life features such as; multiple fonts, font settings, screen options (Luminosity/Tint) support, physical buttons support, etc
• Sleep Support
• Wifi support

What does it look like?



How to install it ?

You'll need to install a "launcher" beforehand. Common options are :

• NickelMenu (NM), recommended option
• Kute File Monitor (KfMon)

Once you're done installing at least one of those two. Please :

• Download the latest Obenkyobo_AIO_Release_*.*.*.zip
• Connect the ereader to your computer and extract the package at its root.

And voilà ! You should now have a "Obenkyobo !" NickelMenu entry at the bottom right corner of your ereader's "home screen" and a new "book" in your library to open with KfMon.

If you're only updating Obenkyobo, you can install the "light" version of the archive instead Obenkyobo_Light_Release_*.*.*.zip. This version is stripped from qt packages you already installed with the previous version and should work fine for updating except if told otherwise.

More informations, How to create my vocabulary sheets ? Source Code, Known Issues, etc

Everything should be found on Obenkyobo's github page

Thanks

Big thank you to OfficerAction, NiLuJe and NiMa for their efforts on their dev tools and helping me figuring some stuff out.

Mandatory laius, program is distributed "as is", I'm in no way responsible if your device catch on fire, your milk turns bad, etc

[rtiangha]

Thanks for making this! I installed the AIO version on my Glo HD and launched it with NickelMenu (I don't have kfmon installed). However, while I can tap on the menus and they highlight, it doesn't do or launch anything and the menu option remains highlighted after I remove my finger. I am running firmware 4.28.18220.

[Aramir]

Originally Posted by rtiangha

Thanks for making this! I installed the AIO version on my Glo HD and launched it with NickelMenu (I don't have kfmon installed). However, while I can tap on the menus and they highlight, it doesn't do or launch anything and the menu option remains highlighted after I remove my finger. I am running firmware 4.28.18220.

Thanks for reporting in, that's a weird issue.
Can you please launch the application, click the menus a couple of time and then send me the content of the

.adds/Obnkyobo/log.txt

file. I don't expect much as I'm not loging a lot of things yet. But I might start focusing on that to debug things more efficiently. Also is the application freezing at any point ? Or is it just not switching pages ?

Edit : I just noticed the NickelMenu entry is commented in my AIO package. So I'm not sure how you managed to launch it without uncommenting it. I'm updating the package and adding more installation steps right now. EDIT2 : it's done.

[rtiangha]

Thanks. I uncommented the NickelMenu entry and copy/pasted it to my existing config file.

The application doesn't seem to freeze; I literally can't get out of the start page.

I did as you asked, but the log.txt file is empty with 0 bytes. Because tapping on things does nothing, I can't actually exit the program without holding down the power button and doing a hard power off, so I wonder if it doesn't get a chance to write to the file before it turns off.

[Aramir]

Originally Posted by rtiangha

Thanks. I uncommented the NickelMenu entry and copy/pasted it to my existing config file.

The application doesn't seem to freeze; I literally can't get out of the start page.

I did as you asked, but the log.txt file is empty with 0 bytes. Because tapping on things does nothing, I can't actually exit the program without holding down the power button and doing a hard power off, so I wonder if it doesn't get a chance to write to the file before it turns off.

I'm not explicitly loging stuff at the moment, so I kinda expected it to be empty but hoped for some Qt error to be in there. I'll see if I can get my hands on another kobo that can reproduce the issue this week. I'll also add some logs here and there in my code to keep track of what is (and is not) happening.

[Aramir]

Obenkyobo V0.1.2 Update :

• Tweaked WelcomePage for better UI Scaling
• MCQ Entries should now autoresize (and warn user about it) when too big to fit.
• log.txt should now contain useful informations for debuging (device informations, build informations, various log, Backtrace upon crash)
• Corrected pya/ぴゃ hriagana

I also added the "How to report a bug?" section to the first post.

Originally Posted by rtiangha

I did as you asked, but the log.txt file is empty with 0 bytes.

I don't expect this new version to fix your issue. But the log.txt might now contain useful informations for me to debug stuff out. I'd appreciate if you took time to give it a shot.

[rtiangha]

Originally Posted by Aramir

I don't expect this new version to fix your issue. But the log.txt might now contain useful informations for me to debug stuff out. I'd appreciate if you took time to give it a shot.

Thanks! I'll give it a try and create an issue on GitHub with the log file to help keep this thread clean.

[Aramir]

A wild Obenkyobo appears !

Obenkyobo v0.2.0 changelog :

• Vocabulary sheet system (create your owns sheets, hide columns/cells to create your memory game, randomize its content, change number of displayed row per page, etc)
• UI fixes (no more blurry icons, misaligned UI element, etc)
• Wifi now turns off on startup (option in Settings/Application)
• Aggressive Hard Refresh (turned on by default for old devices, option in Settings/Application)
• Popup tutorials (explaining in more details how the application work)
• Fixed DateFormat automatic detection
• Fixed sleepcover not working (it will only turn off the light for now)
• Physical buttons support (mapped to scrollers, previous/next page buttons, etc)
• Turned off dithering (reduce artifacts)
• Fixed multiple bugs, typos and other minor things I don't remember

What's NOT in it this update :

• Proper sleep support
• Glo HD support (edit : I caved and bought a Glo HD, I'll work on it when it arrives, no promises)
• Proper height for popups (but it should be fine for now)
• Everything marked as TODO in the menus

[Aramir]

Yet another Obenkyobo update

Obenkyobo v0.2.1 changelog :

• CHANGED VOCAB SHEET FILE EXTENSION FROM .cfg TO .oben
• Added "directory explorer" for vocab sheet eploxrer / selector
• Reworked the way font size is handled and Fonts option pages
• Added manual refresh button in the top menu bar
• Fixed font size resizing incorrectly under certain circumstances
• Fixed wifi checkbox
• Corrected some typos in the popups

What's NOT in it this update :

• Proper sleep support
• Glo HD support, but problem has been identified. I have a jank solution for it at the moment. But it's too jank to be released. Hopefuly the proper fix will make it in the next release
• Proper height for popups (but it should be fine for now)
• Everything marked as TODO in the menus

Edit : Known issue : hardRefresh parameter is messed up. My bad. I'll release a new version this evening fixing it and adding Glo HD support (finally !).

[Aramir]

Yet another Obenkyobo update

Obenkyobo v0.2.2 changelog :

• Fixed Hard Refresh Frequency setting
• Fixed Touch inputs for Kobo Glo HD (and maybe some other devices)

What's NOT in it this update :

• Proper sleep support
• Proper height for popups (but it should be fine for now)
• Everything marked as TODO in the menus

[Aramir]

It's update time, probably the last one for a while.

Obenkyobo v0.2.3 changelog :

• Mainly UI stuff (adding bigger right-arrow to Menus, more padding, adding proper tristate checkboxes to "Edit Kana" Page, rewriting some popup text, adding version number to welcome page, hid the "TODO entries" in menus )
• Adding Malformed Vocab sheet detection system, fixing malformed entry in one default vocab sheet
• Making readme more diggest

[Aramir]

Well it's been a while ! Update time ! And it's quite a big one.

Obenkyobo v0.3.0 changelog (tldr version) :

• Added Vocabulary<->Romanji MCQ with possibility to swap Kanji/Romanji during the test
• Added PROPER SLEEP SUPPORT, no more dead battery under 2 days !!!
• HUGE REFACTORING under the hood for the whole qcm system and data system
• Improved Vocabulary Sheet System (Added Error/Malformed detection system, selection is now working, sheets can be displayed as a screensaver, etc)
• Fixed multiple UI related bugs, improved UI experience and scalability across multiple screen size
• Fixed minor bugs and probably added new ones

I've spent many nights on this application so far. Many nights that I should instead have spent using it and actually learning my japanese (Sorry Konoma senpai). And that's what I'm now planning to do.

This is not yet the end of development for this application. I intend to fix minor bugs, add some ways to add and consult grammar related notes, ways to interface to jisho.com to ask for (and maybe import into .oben sheets) translation directly from the internet, etc... So yeah I've got ideas to enhance it.

But at the same time, I need to shift my priorities. Stop spending time and money to support more and more kobo devices. Especially when I don't even know if anyone is actually using this application on such devices .

So yeah. I might release a hotfix versions in a couple of weeks if I notice some bugs. But otherwise this application is probably going into cryosleep for some months.

I've edited the first post of this thread to be more diggest too, added some demo video.

In the meantime, please keep reporting any bugs, feedbacks, and share your Vocabulary Sheets if you want. And most importantly, have a nice day.