Benkyou Studio // International Language Study Toolkit

What is Benkyou Studio?
Benkyou Studio is a free, open source Toolkit to assist those working with and studying foreign languages. Originally created to help me pass Japanese exam JLPT N1, I have now extended it to support other foreign languages

Provided you have the Dot Net framework, Benkyou Studio can be run in portable mode without installation.

How Does Benkyou Studio assist study?
Benkyou Studio is intended to be a One-stop integrated solution for working and learning with languages,

For the Learner, it has a Multi-Language Dictionary to allow you to lookup words, and add them to your studylist, flashcards,A multi choice Quiz which remembers and adjusts to the words you are struggling with, Speech Synthesis helps you hear the words as you study, you can even export the wordlist to sound files for your portable music player... Click here for more details

For the Professional, it has unicode lookup and converters, a character map viewer and exporter, a text file converter for converting file formats, Advanced "TextTricks" text conversion processing scripts, Milti-Timezone time chart and Multi-Currency calculator... Click here for more details

How do I get Benkyou Studio
Benkyou Studio is free, Open source software, so you can get it for nothing! I am a strong believer in open source, and wanted to provide a tool that could help others enjoy learning a foreign language.
Benkyou Studio is Windows based, it is written in Visual C# Express 2008, it has been tested on Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10
The Text to Speech functions require you to have suitable Windows Speech languages installed.

Benkyou Studio is available here, its is fully functional with no restrictions - this is not trialware.
For updates please see my twitter feed Here,
or download my old study game from Sourceforge

Want to help with Benkyou Studio?
First and foremost, Please tell others about my project, without users, Benkyou Studio cannot achieve its goal of helping others. I am an English speaker who is learning Japanese, I would appreciate help from speakers of other languages... as I want this project to help as many people as possible, and learn as much about other Languages as possible myself
If you are willing to help me support your language, please contact me!

Benkyou Studio uses its own Dictionary format, I can convert other dictionaries to this format to allow the dictionary to support your language, if you know a good free (open source) dictionary which I can convert, please contact me... Please be aware, "No cost" is not enough, it must be allow Free modification and redistribution.

I am not currently looking for programming help, I have my own vision for where this program will go from here, and am confident I can take it there, however, if you have other ideas for this project please remember, it is 100% free open source, you can take it, modify it, and distribute it yourself! all I ask is you make your version free, open source, and credit my original in the documentation. Remember, Benkyou Studio's goal is to teach and empower others, so your derivative should be free and Open Source if you want to build on Benkyou Studio!

Open Source Licensing Details
Benkyou Studio is licensed on the Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial CC BY-NC" license.
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they donâ€™t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

"Non-Commercial" means you cannot sell copies of software based on Benkyou Studio.
You are welcome to use it (or derivatives) at work, give them to your students etc.

Benkyou Studio uses icons provided by icons8, the license of these Icons is detailed in the software readme.

What does Benkyou mean?
For that answer, Lets go straight to the built in Japanese dictionary!

å‹‰å¼· - benkyou - study | diligence | discount | reduction

the "å‹‰" (ben) symbol has the following meanings:
å‹‰ (U52c9) (RK1975) - exertion | endeavor | encourage | strive | make | diligent

The "å‹‰" (ben) symbol is used in words such as:
å‹‰ã‚ã¦ - tsutomete - as much as possible | diligently | make an effort! | work hard!\
å‹‰å¦ - ã¹ã‚“ãŒã - study | pursuit of knowledge |
å‹‰åŠ± - ã¹ã‚“ã‚Œã„ - diligence
å‹¤å‹‰å®¶ - ãã‚“ã¹ã‚“ã‹ - diligent worker | hard worker

The title "Benkyou Studio" is intended to represent the programs goal of providing a professional solution encouraging study and achievement... And as "Benkyou Studio" is a combination of Japanese and English, the domain name was not yet registered!!!

A few of Benkyou Studio's Features:

Multiple Color Schemes: Default, Subltle or Vivid - have things how you want

Dictionary:One dictionary with multiple languages, Search for a word and you'll see the meaning of its symbols, and usage examples.
Want to learn it? Click Add to studylist!

Convert Files:Notepad cant open our EUC-JP file properly, Use the File Converter to change it to another format

Character Map:Need to check the unicode character range? view the character map, and export in HTML format

Mouse Flash:Learn as you use your computer, turn on a semi-transparent flashcard next to your mouse cursor

Quiz:Test yourself on your study list,
Get the answer wrong? you'll be asked the word more often. Get it right? it'll be a little harder next time!

Many more features !
All 100% free!