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Reading Practice

Group Members

• Geza Kovacs
• Andrew Liu
• Anthony Lee
• TA: (TA's name) Vijay Umapathy

Problem Statement

We expect that Americans will increasingly be seeing kanji (also known as Chinese characters) in their daily lives - and, as such, will often need to type them onto computers. Most IMEs, however, are either phonetic methods that require the user to know the readings of the characters, or are shape-based methods which require that the user to already know the correct order in which to draw the strokes. Various online sites exist which allow point-and-click identification of kanji based on their components - however, while easily learnable, this approach is inefficient compared to typing. This project aims to make an IME for kanji which is both easy for English speakers to learn, and will allow the user to input kanji faster with increasing usage of the tool.

Target Users

English speakers who don't know Chinese or Japanese, who find themselves needing to input kanji into computers, either occasionally or frequently.

Proposed Solution

An IME that utilizes the fact that kanji can be decomposed into smaller components (radicals), which can be memorized reasonably easily due to their small number, relatively few strokes, and (for some radicals) pictographic appearances which map easily to their meanings, to make an easily learnable yet efficient IME.

Students studying foreign languages would like to improve their reading abilities but cannot find suitable reading material for their level. There are large collections of sentences in foreign languages available on the web, but these provide no way to filter them according to what students have learned so far in their foreign language classes.

Target Users

Students studying foreign languages, and teachers who would like to use the tool to help their students learn.

Proposed Solution

A tool that determines the user's reading level and provides them with sentences to read, and assists them in understanding the sentences.

GR1 - Task Analysis

GR2 - Designs

GR3 - Paper Prototyping

GR4 - Computer Prototyping

GR6 - User Testing

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