Is Kanji in Motion down?

Brief descriptionKanji in Motion (KiM) is a program for learning to read, in a game-like way, the characters of the two sets of relatively simple Japanese phonetic characters known as hiragana and katakana (together, they are called kana), plus the 2,136 Chinese-like ideographic characters known as the Jōyō Kanji. The goal of the player-learner is to quickly identify and “capture” previously learned characters that move across a playing field. This learning game can be played either as a game in itself or as learning reinforcement and review with the book Japanese Kanji and Kana (newly revised 2012). The current version of the program runs under Windows and macOS. The next version is planned for Android systems.BackgroundKanji textbooks do not fully prepare the learner for the many ways in which kanji confront us in today’s media. Why? Because when reviewing characters in a textbook, they always appear in the same sequence in which they were learned, with no variation in presentation. As a result, it may take a moment of remembering to recognize a previously learned character when it pops up in an unfamiliar context, and sometimes writing disappears before it can be leisurely read: signs seen from a moving vehicle, subtitles in movies, captions and “crawlers” under video images, and karaoke lyrics – they all go by too fast to ponder over, much less look up. That’s what makes it so valuable today to train yourself not just to grasp the readings and meanings of characters, but to do so with speed and facility. And this is just the thinking behind Kanji in Motion (KiM): to have the player quickly recognize and “capture” already learned characters as they swirl around, in a playful approximation of the kind of text that flashes by everywhere in Japan.ConceptFive to ten characters freely chosen by the player or by random selection float around on a playing field, and the player uses the mouse to drag them to their romanization (kana) or their readings and meanings (kanji...