Last, i ditched Android for a Windows Phone experience was in 2011 with 2.2 (Froyo). Recently I have grown to like the design philosophy of Lollipop, and so have been dabbling in Android experience for a week now. Up until KitKat, Android design and working was similar to the tried and tested Windows XP, rooted to late 90s and early 2000s user interface. Something that works out of box, and yet feels lame. I do hope to get “Material Design upgrade” within 2014.
There are few perks of being an Android user over Windows Phone user, and few that I sorely miss in Android. Two of these are 1) out-of-box inability of Android Contacts/People App to sync seamless with Facebook and get the most recent picture for incoming/outgoing call, and 2) Windows phone keyboard with my saved Nepali vocab words. For the first problem, I resorted to Sync.Me, which takes care of most of the thing. The second problem, long word list in Nepali accumulated in Windows Phone had no easy way to get transferred to Android device.
This made me look for alternate, and I did find a solution. There is a very good Hamro Nepali Keyboard, which is a favorite among Nepali Android community. Its free and it works. However, I do not use so much of Nepali/Devanagari characters from my handheld device. Windows phone has Hindi/Devanagari characters with dictionary words as a system add on, and I rarely used it. What I needed was, English-to-Nepali words like – “hijo”, “aaja”, “bholi” and not “हिजो”, “अाज”, “भोली”.
How to (Swipe-like) type “hijo”, “aaja”, “bholi” and not “हिजो”, “अाज”, “भोली” from my Handheld device.
Nepali Words and Android Dictionary Managers.
- I did some online search and it directed me to User Dictionary Manager, User Dictionary Plus, Tweak User Dictionary. All of them, lets me add custom word list to my device.
- Now, I needed a word list of Nepali words in English Language. I did another online search, and found none. Probably due to a limited knowledge of deep web search know-how. Took me some time, before I got a PDF file format of about 3000 Nepali Words listed in English language together with their definitions and Devanagari characters. Copied it, quickly turned it into MS Excel file, and then a long process of cleaning it.
- Took me few hours to produce my first version of custom Nepali word-list file. It had about 2900 Nepali words.
- I downloaded the one of the apps (User Dictionary Manager) and uploaded my list.
- Finally I had some Nepali words on my Android device, that I can use it in keyboard with swipe-like approach.
- Then I downloaded Tweak User Dictionary. Tweak User Dictionary claimed to have around 4k Nepali words listed (as of November 15th) as opposed to only having handful of Hindi, Bengali, Marathi words. I installed it, and then increased my total word counts to 5700. I also did a duplicate check and deleted them.
- Final file is shared here – wordlist.txt (its rusty, but should work)
I will be updating this file, until I find another bigger version of it (which I am sure is somewhere out there). Now I can swipe my Nepali words (in English language).
momobites 