JUPITER: a kanji learning environment focusing on a learner's browsing

Abstract

The paper describes the development of an interactive learning environment, called JUPITER, which supports kanji (Chinese character) learning. Kanji learning is important and difficult for foreigners who are learning the Japanese language since there are more than 2000 kanji and a vast amount of kanji compounds in Japanese. In recent years, the Internet has come into wide use, so that anybody can get Japanese documents without being in Japan. The authors think that these documents can be resources for learning Japanese. The JUPITER system takes these documents as educational material and links them to a kanji dictionary. A learner can select the target sentences freely from daily electronic media (e.g. E-mail, WWW and NetNews). In learner browsing, however, documents have many kanji so it is often difficult for a learner to read kanji. JUPITER has the function of learner monitoring and a student model on a framework of an information filtering system. JUPITER records the kanji content in the browsed documents and analyzes those which are important for a learner. By showing the read information related with important kanji, a learner can learn in a step-by-step manner with JUPITER.