Writing Foreign Language Education Program

[Aegimius]

Greetings. I was wondering if anyone here has used Java to write
programs for foreign language education. I am not a professional
programmer, so do not know Java very well. I am/was proficient at
Visual Basic, as well as HTML, but I am rusty due to not having flexed
my programming muscle for a long time now. It seems that Java is much
more versatile than VB. For now, my aim is to learn enough Java to be
able to write my own "self-tutor" programs, and I'll pretty much be the
only person using and writing it. Is there any particular area of Java
I should focus on to get started? And how does one incorporate foreign
scripts into Java, like Cyrillic, Devanagari, Hebrew as well as
Classical Chicken Scratches and Gibberish? Is there a site I can go to
to steal or borrow some code to use as a template? Of course I realize
that there are a lot of language programs already out there, some of
them very good, some of them free, and some of them very expensive.
Many of them suffer from what I perceive as limitations. But more
importantly, learning Java will be a worthwhile experience in and of
itself, and although I'd be a hobbyist at heart, it would be great to
become a Java expert as well. Thank you.

Aegimius

 

[Rhino]

Greetings. I was wondering if anyone here has used Java to write
programs for foreign language education. I am not a professional
programmer, so do not know Java very well. I am/was proficient at
Visual Basic, as well as HTML, but I am rusty due to not having flexed
my programming muscle for a long time now. It seems that Java is much
more versatile than VB. For now, my aim is to learn enough Java to be
able to write my own "self-tutor" programs, and I'll pretty much be the
only person using and writing it. Is there any particular area of Java
I should focus on to get started? And how does one incorporate foreign
scripts into Java, like Cyrillic, Devanagari, Hebrew as well as
Classical Chicken Scratches and Gibberish? Is there a site I can go to
to steal or borrow some code to use as a template? Of course I realize
that there are a lot of language programs already out there, some of
them very good, some of them free, and some of them very expensive.
Many of them suffer from what I perceive as limitations. But more
importantly, learning Java will be a worthwhile experience in and of
itself, and although I'd be a hobbyist at heart, it would be great to
become a Java expert as well. Thank you.

For information about learning Java in general, do a Google Groups search on
this newsgroup: you'll find that this question is often asked several times
a week - and even several times a day - so it has been "answered to death"
already. The answer doesn't change much over time.

To address the specific issue of making Java programs multilingual, the key
buzzwords you need to know are internationalization and localization,
frequently abbreviated to i18n and and l10n. You will find both of these
discussed quite thoroughly in a "trail" (chapter) of the Java Tutorial:
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/i18n/index.html.

I've done a fair bit of work with i18n/l10n, although pretty much
exclusively with European languages. However, there is support for the more
exotic languages as well and all languages use essentially the same
techniques. In other words, if you can make a program accomodate English and
French users, adding in Korean or Hindi or whatever shouldn't require
learning many additional techniques.

 

[Oliver Wong]

Greetings. I was wondering if anyone here has used Java to write
programs for foreign language education. I am not a professional
programmer, so do not know Java very well. I am/was proficient at
Visual Basic, as well as HTML, but I am rusty due to not having flexed
my programming muscle for a long time now. It seems that Java is much
more versatile than VB. For now, my aim is to learn enough Java to be
able to write my own "self-tutor" programs, and I'll pretty much be the
only person using and writing it. Is there any particular area of Java
I should focus on to get started?

See http://riters.com/JINX/index.cgi/How_20do_20I_20learn_20Java_3f to get
started on learning Java. Once you've got the basics down ("Hello world!",
etc.), you'll want to start to learn GUI programming. Depending on how fancy
you want your program to be, you can then study XML or database access to
store your lesson files.

And how does one incorporate foreign
scripts into Java, like Cyrillic, Devanagari, Hebrew as well as
Classical Chicken Scratches and Gibberish?

It's automatic. Java uses Unicode, a standard which is intended to allow
for the representation of scripts in as many human languages as possible,
including "ancient, dead languages". Just make sure you have a font
installed on your system capable of displaying those characters.

Is there a site I can go to
to steal or borrow some code to use as a template?

It's not clear what your program does, so it's difficult to answer this.

Of course I realize
that there are a lot of language programs already out there, some of
them very good, some of them free, and some of them very expensive.
Many of them suffer from what I perceive as limitations. But more
importantly, learning Java will be a worthwhile experience in and of
itself, and although I'd be a hobbyist at heart, it would be great to
become a Java expert as well. Thank you.

I currently use the Pauker flash card program to help my studies in
Japanese. It's written in Java, and you might want to take a look, if you're
doing a flash-card style learning program: http://pauker.sourceforge.net/

- Oliver