Kanabuche is a very simple Ruby script to help learning Japanese kana characters, namely hiragana and katakana.
You'll need Unicode support and japanese fonts to display the kanas in your terminal and of course a Ruby interpreter.
The script kanabuche.rb takes parameters to narrow the range of characters you want to practice, so that you can learn progressively. You can ask to work only on hiragana, using the -H switch, or only on katakana, using the -K switch. You can also specify a list of sounds that you want to practice.
For example, to work only on hiragana characters containing the sounds 'k' or 'o', you can invoke Kanabuche like this:
$ ruby kanabuche.rb -H k o Welcome to Kanabuche!
Working on k and o. 31 questions.
Hiragana: け Romaji: [...]To specify that you want to work on the first row (a, i, u, e, o), pass the empty string!
$ ruby kanabuche.rb -K '' Welcome to Kanabuche!
Working on vowels. 5 questions.
Katakana: オ Romaji: o
Good!
[...]
Good!
Katakana: イ Romaji: i
Good! 4 good answers on 5 questions. Duration: 0 minutes and 15 secondsHappy kana learning!
As a bonus, you can also practice kanji characters for numbers if you pass the option -N.
$ ruby kanabuche.rb -N Welcome to Kanabuche!
Working on all characters. 13 questions.
Kanji: 一 Digits: 1
Good!
Kanji: 七 Digits: 2
No, 七 is 7.
[...]
Kanji: 千 Digits: 1000
Good! 12 good answers on 13 questions. Duration: 31 seconds .
