Kanji Tutor I.

Kanji Tutor I. (KTutor) is a little, simple and nonetheless quite ugly piece of DOS software that still might prove to be a little help in kanji studies. Actually, the only part of the software that I myself consider to be of real value is its database: while most of the freeware/shareware Japanese kanji study software efforts I have met include not more than a couple of hundreds of kanjis and maybe some compound words, too, KTutor uses a database of all the 1945 Joyo Kanji (with almost 4000 readings) and around 9000 jukugos, compound words; altogether a little over 11000 lexical units. And KTutor knows these in two languages, English and Hungarian.

KTutor is designed to be run on IBM PC and compatible computers under any available version of MS- DOS, PC-DOS or DR-DOS. In 1992, when the idea first came, I wanted to support even Hercules graphics cards which idea I fortunately gave up, but KTutor runs even now on an XT if it has a VGA graphics card.

To make life easier for those who have only slow modem Internet-access (like me), KTutor comes in 4 ZIP-archived packages. There are certain parts of the program that won't ever change, and I separated the English and Hungarian databases as you don't need both to run the software.

All you have to do is to UNZIP the files into one directory and type KTUTOR /E or KTUTOR /H, depending on which language you want to run it (English and Hungarian, respectively.)

There seem to have remained a few typing mistakes, mainly in the Japanese words. If you discover any errors, please, let me know.

The program can be used not only to practice but to learn new kanjis. If you wish to do so, probably one of the best methods is to select a range of about 50 kanjis (maybe a little fewer but definitely not more) and then do the Kanji and Jukugo reading checks until the program says there are no more new ones. (Don't type a single word; just keep hitting Enter, or 'X' if you knew the word. Read more about the "X" cheat in the manual.) Don't care if you can't write the kanjis -- just be able to recognize them without fail. Then you may wish to practice writing, but again, do until you mastered all the lexical units. Then move to the next 50. The Tests are rather for checking your existing knowledge than learning new kanjis.

Download KTutor

Base fonts and BGI driver v1.00, 04/96 (150,080 bytes)

EXE, help and manuals v1.00, 04/96 (127,098 bytes)

English database v1.02, 05/96 (381,219 bytes)

There was a very stupid mistake in the English database (I kept checking the Hungarian one thinking that there can be no difference between the Japanese text between the English and Hungarian databases, being one copy of the other -- I was dead wrong.). Thanks to Jeff Logan, who warned me, now it's past.
IMPORTANT! Though you can practice without any problems with DB v1.01 if you set the lower level above 20, the mistake messes up the management of the personal history file; so I encourage everybody to download this new version and to create a brand new personal history file. And I'm really sorry for the inconveniences. From now on I'll keep some record of the corrected mistakes here.

Hungarian database v1.02, 05/96 (401,018 bytes)

There was no problem with the Hungarian database like above. The only difference between DB v1.01 and v1.02 are two mistyped Japanese words (machiawaseru and giketsu).