JDrill is a program for multiple-choice testing in the Japanese Katakana and Hiragana scripts. Katakana and Hiragana are phonetic; in each of these two scripts, each character represents a sound, just like with Roman characters. Katakana's 50 characters are typically used for writing words borrowed from other languages, such as from English or German or French. Hiragana's 50 characters are used for writing native Japanese words that are not easily written using Kanji, whose 1,950 official characters (and 1,000 unofficial characters) each represent not a sound but a concept. JDrill does not do Kanji testing.

JDrill presents test-questions to the user (in English) and grades him when the test is complete. This screen shot shows an example of a test in progress. The user answered this question wrong, and the program is showing him what the right answer was.

Download instjd10.exe - Version 1.0 - Win95/98/NT - 410K

Installation Instructions

Download the provided file to your desktop. When it has finished downloading, go to your desktop and double-click on it to run the installer. Once the installer has completed, you can safely delete the instjd10.exe file. When it is installed, you can go to Start Menu / Programs / JDrill / JDrill to run it. A user's manual is included. You can uninstall it from the Control Panel's Add/Remove Programs window.

Handy tip: If you're using JDrill for personal practice, I recommend putting it into your Startup folder; this will make your automatically pop up a drill for you at least once each day.