Kanji Tester

Status: no longer maintained

OVERVIEW

Kanji Tester is an adaptive testing system for Japanese, which automatically generates multiple choice questions for learners. This README describes how to build it from scratch.

For other information, check Kanji Tester's wiki page:

http://bitbucket.org/larsyencken/kanji-tester/wiki/

or email Lars directly (lars@yencken.org).

PACKAGE DEPENDENCIES

Kanji Tester has a number of package dependencies. These are all listed in its setup.py file. It is not currently designed to be run as an installed package, so unfortunately you can't install these package dependencies automatically by simply easy_install'ing kanji tester. Instead, install each of them individually first.

You also need Scons (a make replacement) and cython installed. To build the C extensions, simply type "scons" from within the base directory.

DATA DEPENDENCIES

A number of data files are required to build Kanji Tester. Currently, they require a single directory to contain them. Create a file:

kanji_tester/local_settings.py

to contain your settings for this workspace, and add the path to a data folder in the DATA_DIR settings, e.g.:

DATA_DIR = '/home/lars/kanji_test/data'

A number of files are required in the following structure:

data/
    corpus/
        jp_char_corpus_counts.gz    # kanji frequencies
        jp_word_corpus_counts.gz    # word frequencies
        kanji_readings__edict       # (reading | kanji) frequencies
        kanji_readings__edict.map   # (alternation | kanji, reading) freq.
    syllabus/
        my_syllabus.{chars,words,aligned} # a syllabus to test
    aligned/
        je_edict.aligned.gz         # GP-aligned EDICT entries
    JMdict.gz                       # Japanese-English dictionary

In the future, these would ideally be decoupled somewhat from Kanji Tester. At the current time, the easiest thing is to email and ask for a copy of this data bundle, or to download it from the Bitbucket project page, if you have access.

BUILDING THE DATABASE

Kanji Tester also needs MySQL as its database backend. Construct an empty database for it, and place the settings for accessing the database in:

kanji_test/local_settings.py

In particular, you need:

DATABASE_ENGINE = 'mysql'

and also set DATABASE_NAME, DATABASE_USER and DATABASE_PASSWORD appropriately. Ensure the database is constructed with utf8 as the default encoding, and utf8_general_ci as the default collation. For example, in mysql, type:

CREATE DATABASE kanjitest_dev
DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 DEFAULT COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

Kanji Tester then needs its initial tables generated. You achieve this by running:

source environmentVars.sh
cd kanji_test
./manage.py syncdb
./manage.py migrate

At this stage, Kanji Tester will have empty tables. You now need to populate them:

./manage.py build

This step may take a while, and is very database (and disk) intensive. You should also ensure DEBUG is set to False in local_settings.py, otherwise memory usage will be very high, since Django stores all database queries in memory when in debug mode.

When this step is completed, Kanji Tester is ready for use. Note that if the build is interupted for any reason, you can simply run the build command again and it will resume where it left off. If you run it on an already built system, it will only rebuild parts which have changed.

Finally, run:

./manage.py runserver

to run the system. You can then find the system at http://localhost:8000/.

• Lars Yencken <lars@yencken.org>