Resources

References

Arns, J. (2014, July 25). A brief history of the Japanese writing system Skritter Blog. Retrieved from https://blog.skritter.com/2014/07/a-brief-history-of-the-japanese-writing-system/

Hiragana. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://japanese-lesson.com/characters/hiragana/index.html

Hub Japan. (2016, September 28). An Overview and History of Japanese Language: Kanji,. Retrieved from https://hubjapan.io/articles/an-overview-and-history-of-japanese-language-kanji-hiragana-and-katakana

JapaneseUp. (n.d.). What is Hiragana? Retrieved from https://japaneseup.com/what-is-hiragana/

Kim, T. (2017, October 16). Hiragana. Retrieved from http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar/hiragana

Koichi. (2014, June 30). Learn Hiragana: The Ultimate Guide. Retrieved from https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/

Mozilla. (n.d.). Map. Retrieved from https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Map

Saha, R. (2017, July 11). How did Hiragana and Katakana originate? Retrieved from http://www.sakuramani.com/how-did-hiragana-and-katakana-originate/

Smith, C. (2016, November 4). Pangrams. Retrieved from https://camtsmith.com/articles/2016-11/pangrams

Walsh, D. (2016, May 18). CSS Flip Animation. Retrieved from https://davidwalsh.name/css-flips

Other information

• Instead of adding a rollover effect to an image I added it to the divs on the character page. Hovering over a character makes the box shadow change. This follows google's design recommendations for material design.
• The arrow buttons on the learning page were created using Gimp, an open source photo editing tool.
• Audio is embedded in the characters page and can be played by clicking on the hirgana characters. This audio was retrieved from Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese.
• JavaScript was used to play the audio on the character page in order to avoid using the default audio player used by the browser. It was also used for the flashcards in the learn page to create a randomized list and allow scrolling through the cards.
• The embedded rich media is the YouTube video on the first page of the stoke order for the Hiragana characters.

Summary

This site is meant to be a resource for people to go to when the want to begin learning Japanese. Hiragana is often the first set of characters novices learn. This site is a good resource because it provides a summary of what hiragana is, a list of all the basic characters, their pronunciations, and a place to practice them. The most difficult part of this assignment was shuffling the array containing the romaji on the learning cards. I feel like the home page is very text heavy and could be improved.
The parts of the site I think turned out the best were the character page, the flashcards, and the box shadows. The characters page is very effective because it is simple, easy to understand and shows a lot of information in a clean way. Flashcards were the most complicated thing I have done in JavaScript. I think I did a nice job making sure the users cannot click the next button when they reach the end of the list and same for the beginning. The third thing I did well was the box shadows. I intentionally followed Google's design standards with box shadows to create a clean and responsive design. This is especially apparent on the characters page when the user hovers over a character card.