What is important to one language's ear might sound insignificant to another's, and it works both ways. For this reason, I have built in the idea of fuzzy searching, whereby the search will often be able to ignore those linguistic characteristics of a word's spelling (in romaji) which might be missed by an English speaker.
For example, the capital city of Japan is not ``tokyo'', but ``toukyou''. The long vowels are very important in Japanese, yet the English speaker is used to glossing over such details as not being important to our speech.
To help the non-native speaker find words more quickly, I've implemented what I call a fuzzy search. A fuzzy search will attempt to mitigate the difficulties non-native speakers have identifying the exact Japanese.
In a fuzzy search:
to
'' is considered the same as ``tou
'',
``too
'', or ``to-
''.
As an example, consider the fuzzy search of ``tokyo
''.
Among other, the following will be returned:
There is a word in Japanese, , for someone
whose kanji-writing ability has suffered due to over-reliance on the
kana->kanji conversion systems used to input Japanese text on a computer.
They merely need to recognize the correct kanji, so their ability to
actually produce it diminishes. Don't let this kind of thing
happen with your pronunciation
One note: a fuzzy search does not include certain grammatical points of aural confusion:
wa
'' will not match ha
'' to match it)
o
'' will not match wo
'' to match it)
e
'' will not match he
'' to match it)
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