Parts of Umesh Sensei Online Academy are built on open-source work generously shared by others. This page credits that work and names the licence each part is used under, as those licences require. We are grateful to everyone listed here โ the kanji writing practice on this site would not exist without them.
1. hanzi-writer-data-jp / AnimCJK โ kanji stroke animation data
The stroke-by-stroke animations in Kanji Quest โ the ones that show you how a character is written, and that follow your finger as you trace it โ are drawn using the hanzi-writer-data-jp dataset, which this site now serves from its own server. That data comes from AnimCJK, created by Franรงois Mizessyn, which in turn builds on Make Me a Hanzi and on glyph data from the Arphic PL KaitiM GB and Arphic PL UKai fonts.
2. Make Me a Hanzi โ Chinese character stroke data
When a character has no Japanese stroke entry, the writing practice falls back to Make Me a Hanzi, a stroke-data project by Shaunak Kishore derived from the Arphic font family.
3. KanjiStrokeOrders font
The printable stroke-order worksheets you can download from Kanji Quest are typeset with the KanjiStrokeOrders font, which shows the numbered stroke sequence inside each character. The font is included in the generated PDF files.
4. Hanzi Writer
Hanzi Writer is the JavaScript library that animates the strokes and checks your handwriting as you trace a character.
5. KanjiVG โ kanji stroke-order data
KanjiVG, created by Ulrich Apel, describes the stroke order, stroke shape and component structure of each kanji โ it knows, for instance, that ๆ is built from ็ซ, ๅ, ๅฟ and ๅค. This site hosts a copy of KanjiVG for the kanji dictionary it is being used to build. It is not the data behind the writing practice described in entry 1.
6. KANJIDIC2, JMdict and KRADFILE โ the dictionary data
The meanings, readings, stroke counts, example words and radical breakdowns in the kanji dictionary come from the files published by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group (EDRDG), a project begun by Jim Breen. KANJIDIC2 supplies the per-kanji information, JMdict the Japanese–English word entries used for the example vocabulary, and KRADFILE the radical lookup that lets you find a kanji by the parts it is written with. These files are used as published; the Nepali meanings on this site are our own work and are not part of them.
7. kanji-data โ JLPT level list
The N5–N1 label shown on each kanji comes from kanji-data, a community-compiled list maintained by David Luco. The JLPT has published no official kanji list since 2010, so this list is a well-researched guide rather than an authority; where it disagrees with the kanji actually taught in our courses, the course is what the course teaches.
8. Our KanjiVG-derived stroke data
For kanji that the data in entry 1 does not cover, and for the sixty-odd characters where it showed the Chinese rather than the Japanese stroke order, we converted KanjiVG (entry 5) into the format the animation needs. Those converted files are our adaptation of KanjiVG, not KanjiVG itself, and they are published on the same terms. What we changed: the SVG outlines were converted to stroke paths and median points, the coordinate system was rescaled, and the affected characters were re-ordered to follow the Japanese stroke order taught in Japan. We do not use Chinese-order data to stand in for Japanese stroke order.
Questions
If you believe something used on this site is missing from this page, please contact us and we will correct it.