L3x i18n r2t

Every time I tangle with internationalisation under Linux I am astonished at how hard it is to get it working.

( rant and notes to remind me next time I have to configure a machine )

Oh, and even when it's all set up, your applications have to be written to cope with input methods. pterm isn't, much to my annoyance.

Update 2008-09-17: Pango (font engine used under the hood by Firefox) tends to prefer Chinese fonts to Japanese in a non-ja locale. This setting forces it to prefer Japanese ones (goes in .xsession or similar):

# Tell Pango what fonts to prefer: English first (otherwise
# we use a Japanese font for Latin text, which usually looks
# awful) then Japanese (so kanji don't end up in a Chinese
# font). Specific language information should override this
# so actual Chinese will probably still come out correctly.
export PANGO_LANGUAGE='en;ja'

Hope this year's test is as easy as 2003's was...

I got the results back from the proficiency test past paper we did last week:

• kanji/vocab paper: overall 78%, broken down:
  • kanji reading: 80%
  • kanji writing: 80%
  • vocabulary: 76%
• reading and grammar paper: overall 89%, broken down:
  • reading comprehension: 95%
  • grammar: 81%
• listening comprehension paper: 90%

...for an overall score of 86.5% [passmark 60%] (the papers and their subsections are unevenly weighted so reading comprehension is most important and kanji least). So I'm feeling reasonably confident about passing now. Interestingly, although I average about 80%, I'm only actually confident of my answer about 40% of the time; I seem to be good at making educated guesses :-)