Japanese words practice

Live demo

Practice katakana words extracted from JMdict EDICT.

Up and running

You'll need PHP 8.0 and Composer.

1. Clone this repository
2. Run composer install
3. Download the JMdict EDICT2 file and extract to the same directory [extract.php](extract.php)
4. Run vendor/bin/doctrine-migrations migrate which will create the db.sqlite3 file
5. Run php extract.php to pull out katakana words from the EDICT file and pop them in to SQLite database
6. Copy .env.dist to .env and fill in the AWS credentials
7. Copy everything to a web-accessible host
8. Done

Reasoning

I needed some practice with katakana words - Duolingo is great but easy to guess from context - and I wanted to hear what the word should sound like and understand what it's supposed to say / mean.

Build

Uses the wonderful JMdict project and pulls out words that are totally within the Unicode katakana block, stores them within an SQLite database, and then pulls out a random one on each page load.

The voice is generated by Amazon Polly and is played on-demand (as long as your browser doesn't autoload audio that is flagged with preload="none") via a pre-signed URL.

Attributions

The JMDict EDICT file is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence (V3.0).