KANAGRID is a simple tool to memorize the two syllabaries of the Japanese language (hiragana and katakana).
Press ENTER to show the menu to change the current level (1-11), switch to hiragana or to katakana mode, or show the controls. Press the 🅾(Y/Z)-key if you already know the currently highlighted character, or ❎(X) if you don't know the character and would like to see how to pronounce the kana. If you use a controller, these two keys should be mapped to controller buttons 1 and 2, depending on the controller used.
The levels 1-10 correspond to the ten columns in which the kana are usually presented (A-KA-SA-TA-NA-HA-MA-YA-RA-WA). Level 11 lets you train all the 46 basic hiragana or katakana. The current level is automatically increased after validating several time that a kana is already known. Since not all katakana dakuten and combination characters are available in PICO-8, KANAGRID is limited to the basic characters only.
The built-in font of the PICO-8 platform is small so some characters may be difficult to recognize at first glance. It is advisable in the beginning to have a hiragana and a katakana chart at hand. I like the charts that can be found here and here.
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Hello,
I adapted the famous Commodore 64 BASIC one-liner "10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10" to the PICO-8 as a first learning experience. There are code snippets as comment available that you can copy to the prompt in interactive mode or run the program as you would normally and change the pattern in the pause menu. There is also a short blog entry available at my website, where I provide a link to the website hosting a free PDF version of an interesting book published by Nick Montfort et al. about this originally single line of code.
Have fun!
Michael
