Kanji Sudoku

I've been busy again :-)

You can guess how curious I have been to check the popularity of Sudoku at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair, especially regarding the Asian countries. A very subjective impression: in Korea and China Sudoku and other language puzzles like crossword puzzles seem to be farely unknown. Hong Kong, Singapore & Malaysia are somewhat aware of Sudoku but it's far away from the Western hype. And: Sudoku with Chinese characters are totally unknown. However, nearly everyone to whom I explained this idea was quickly 'infected', so there IS a big NEW market for all you folks out there (if you dare it!) and anyway a lot of work for me still to be done...

Recently I stumbled again (seems I never learnt to walk straight on :-) - Sudoku is about avoiding redundant informations (at least at the hardest level). Regarding the typical 9x9 format with nine different givens (usually the numbers 1-9, but you already know my ambitions to change that :-) there is still something left to be redundant: the 9th given (which ever)! Dropping that so only 8 different GIVENS are given (couldn't stand to play this pun :-) from the beginning will help me to solve this 'Sudoku Paradoxon'. I named these Sudoku the 'Less Given Sudoku' - this is not a new type of Sudoku games like 'Samurai' and so on, but fits to all logical variants: just be smart and drop more redundant information - it's all about LOGIC!

Well, a website with interesting stuff will not do without marketing which caused me to launch some press releases in the last weeks.

As with the Kanji Sudoku it really took me a very long time to get a fascinating reason for offering Hiragana Sudoku. The answer: Japanese proverbs. Beside of finding proverbs (kotowaza) with exactly nine different hiragana some handmade Sudoku with the proverbs in a line have been necessary to create this new way of learning not only Hiragana but also some Japanese aswell. Some interactive (Java Script) Japanese-English Kanji crossword puzzles have been added, too.

HINT (regarding the various free pdf files at www.Kanji-Sudoku.com): You might consider to download Adobe's free Asian font packs for Adobe [Acrobat] Reader (and the latest version of Adobe's Reader aswell) to install the necessary fonts on non-native computer systems to view and print pdf documents with CJK (Chinese-Japanese-Korean) fonts.

Hope to come back to you soon. All the best to those of you interested in learning the Chinese and Japanese language!

# posted by Claus @ 4:32 AM