After BASIC, I started studying 8086 assembly using a86 (around 1989). Over the next couple years I wrote a Japanese quizzing program. I'm still exceedingly proud of it. It bitmaps japanese characters in vga, asks you the pronunciation, asks you to choose the correct definition from a list, then puts the word into one of three piles based on how well you did.
Before I had a japanese capable text editor (MOKE), I made a little text entry tool for making the words. You entered the Nelson radical and remaining strokes, then chose the character from a letter-indexed list. I had pointers into an array of pointers into an array of pointers before I knew what the word pointer meant.
Before I was on the net and got jiskan.bdf, I hand drew the characters by moving with the cursor keys over a grid. There was a toggle or shift arrangement that allowed you to move, draw, or erase.
There's only one version: n-1.0.tar.gz. You can also browse through the code online.