Taking opinions and suggestions for a personal project :)
Yes, I'm alive and actually in the workplace. XD I hope everyone's doing okay.
There's this thing I'm currently working on, and I'm planning to put it out on the Web for public consumption. But certain factors are hindering me from doing so, and I need your help. This project is basically a combination of 2 things that I'm currently into: music and the Japanese language.
About the project
Since I'm self-studying Japanese at the moment, I decided to do furigana for song lyrics. The idea is inspired by a friend who shared to me that belting out Japanese songs in karaoke helped her a lot in learning kanji. (That friend of mine currently has a JLPT Level 2 certification and is normally assigned to Japanese projects because of her proficiency in the language.) So I thought if I would provide furigana for song lyrics, it would help other people like me in learning how to read kanji.
How I'm going about it
I pick a song from the Japanese albums I physically have and look at the song booklets that come with them. I manually encode the lyrics in an HTML file, making sure that it will be read by all major browsers. There's such a thing called Ruby characters which is especially made for annotations like furigana. It allows for easier encoding but it's not compatible with some browsers like IE so I'm resorting to something more primitive in terms of coding standards. As of now, I've finished Arashi's Rock this and I plan to move on to the other songs in the Beautiful World album.
Here's where you come in
I need feedback on A LOT of things:
EDIT (2/06, 5:47PM GMT+8): Tumblr's a no-go. It doesn't even support tables. *headdesk*
There's this thing I'm currently working on, and I'm planning to put it out on the Web for public consumption. But certain factors are hindering me from doing so, and I need your help. This project is basically a combination of 2 things that I'm currently into: music and the Japanese language.
About the project
Since I'm self-studying Japanese at the moment, I decided to do furigana for song lyrics. The idea is inspired by a friend who shared to me that belting out Japanese songs in karaoke helped her a lot in learning kanji. (That friend of mine currently has a JLPT Level 2 certification and is normally assigned to Japanese projects because of her proficiency in the language.) So I thought if I would provide furigana for song lyrics, it would help other people like me in learning how to read kanji.
How I'm going about it
I pick a song from the Japanese albums I physically have and look at the song booklets that come with them. I manually encode the lyrics in an HTML file, making sure that it will be read by all major browsers. There's such a thing called Ruby characters which is especially made for annotations like furigana. It allows for easier encoding but it's not compatible with some browsers like IE so I'm resorting to something more primitive in terms of coding standards. As of now, I've finished Arashi's Rock this and I plan to move on to the other songs in the Beautiful World album.
Here's where you come in
I need feedback on A LOT of things:
- Is there an audience for this sort of thing? I personally find a kick in doing furigana, but if I am going to make it available for other people I have to somewhat ensure that someone else will actually make use of what I did.
- Should I post romaji along with the furigana? This seems to be the more beneficial approach since there might be some people who don't understand hiragana or katakana. Another approach would be to make my own hiragana-katakana-romaji guide since I'm aware there are different styles of writing romaji.
- Currently, I'm considering posting the lyrics on Blogspot since the CSS overrides that I need seem to work there. I can't seem to work around the LJ codes for now. If anyone has suggestions for other blogging platforms that allow custom CSS overrides for free where I can post, that would be great. :)
EDIT (2/06, 5:47PM GMT+8): Tumblr's a no-go. It doesn't even support tables. *headdesk*