JSL Online Resources

[Sakunyuusha]

For JSL textbook recommendations, click here.
For help translating kana or kanji you cannot read, click here.

In this thread, I will provide a list of free online resources for English-speaking JSL students to use.​

(You will need to be able to see Unicode characters, including Japanese characters, to make full use of this guide.)​

Online Dictionaries:
★★★★★ Jim Breen's WWWJDIC - site, post

Online Translation Engines for Copied-and-Pasted URLs:
★★★ Rikai - site, post

Online JSL Learning Resources:
▲▲▲▲ a kanji guessing game - site
●●●● Wikipedia - Hiragana - table
●●●● Wikipedia - Katakana - table
■■ Wikipedia - Kanji - List of kanji by stroke-count - site

Web Communities Dedicated to JSL Discussion:
★★ 4-ch Japanese board - site

 

[Sakunyuusha]

Legend/Key:
Shapes: (who do I think the site is best for?)
× = useful to nobody, regardless of proficiency in Japanese
● = useful to JSL beginners and some JSL intermediates
▲ = useful to JSL intermediates, some JSL beginners, and/or some JSL experts
■ = useful to JSL experts and some JSL intermediates
★ = useful to almost anyone, regardless of proficiency in Japanese

Quantity: (how much do I recommend the site?)
★ = Not recommended. Please do not use it.
★★ = Not recommended. If you want to use it, okay, fine, whatever.
★★★ = Recommended to try out for yourself. I did not like it.
★★★★ = Recommended. However, I do not use it very often, nor have I ever used it very often. But it's a good resource all the same.
★★★★★ = Highly recommended. I use it very often to this day; or I used to use it very often but may have since outgrown it.


Thread Guidelines:
● Discussion of JSL online resources is encouraged, whether they are listed yet or not.
● Suggestions for additions or deletions to the list are welcome but may not always be implemented.
● Suggestions for JSL freeware may be listed in the future but will not be ranked. I am not comfortable with downloading and installing numerous JSL programs.
● Please do not recommend shareware or corporate software.
● Please do not recommend sites which require registration.
● Please do not recommend sites which require financial payments.
● Please do not recommend sites which are both obscure and bad: only recommend obscure sites if they are good, and only recommend bad sites if they are popular and you want to protect JSL learners from harm.
● Please do not post requests for translations in this thread!

I will ask a moderator to edit or delete any posts which violate these guidelines. If you require additional translation assistance, please consult the links at the very top of this post.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

Jim Breen's WWWJDIC

WWWJDIC is an internationally-renowned free Japanese-English dictionary created by Jim Breen, a retired professor who taught at Monash University and who coupled his expertise in computer science with his passion for Japanese linguistics to create the WWWJDIC. I would encourage you to bookmark this site.

Here is an explanation of some of the more useful features of the site:

• The Word Search feature allows you to paste Japanese text (kanji, kana, or if you click the checkbox then even romaji) into the search box and to then generate a list of Japanese words which resemble the search string you typed or pasted in. Every result provides kanji (when applicable), pronunciation (in hiragana), and the English meaning of the word. Many of the definitions are supplemented by actual use in a Japanese sentence (sometimes as many as 100 sentences or more!) with the English sentence equivalent written directly beneath it. This makes the Word Search feature very useful to the JSL learner!
• The Translate Words feature was originally the default page you were linked to when visiting WWWJDIC. While inferior for almost all single-word searches (which are better handled by Word Search), the one exception to this is proper nouns, e.g. last names. You will therefore want to use this feature when attempting to translate proper nouns, such as a Japanese person's name. Translate Word usually does a good job of giving you all of the most common readings of the name. For example:
  • Word Search does not return any reading for the somewhat-common family name 松本
  • Translate Word not only returns the #1 reading -- Matsumoto -- but also returns other, rarer readings for the name.
  In order to select the most appropriate reading of a proper noun, sometimes it requires a little knowledge ahead of time. For example:
  • Translate Word tells us that the most common reading of 浜崎 is Hamazaki, but it also reports that Hamasaki and Hamazaha are possible readings.
  • In fact, the porn star Hamasaki Rio writes her name 浜崎 with an s, not with a z. So if you translated her name using the first word -- Hamazaki -- you'd be making a mistake.
• The Multi-Radical Kanji feature is the single most useful kanji dictionary I know of. While Jim Breen does have a copy-and-paste dictionary for kanji, I am much more often in need of a radical-based dictionary because I am looking up kanji which are not puretext that I can copy and paste.
• The Kanji Look-up feature may be more beneficial for you if you typically have kanji which you are able to copy and paste. However, this feature is not likely to be as beneficial to you as Translate Word is. This is because Kanji Look-up will output the definitions of single kanji one at a time. Its purpose is to tell you what a given character means, not what groups of characters together mean in the formation of a single word. For example, 真面目 means "hard-working" or "earnest", but Kanji Look-up tells us all of the meanings of the characters 真, 面, and 目.

You have probably already realized at this point that Jim Breen's dictionary is not accessible to people who cannot at least read hiragana. However, if you cannot already do so, I would suggest learning how to read the 51 basic Japanese hiragana characters. If you want tips, please do ask. I am omitting them so as to not patronize you if you can already read kana.

Review:
Easy to use? 4/5, but requires some knowledge of the Japanese alphabet
Powerful tool? 5/5
Flexible tool? 4/5
Do I use it often? 5/5
Is the server reliable? 5/5
Is the site still maintained and updated? 5/5
Overall: ★★★★★

 

[Sakunyuusha]

Rikai is a popular free-to-use website which offers Japanese-to-English translations of webpages. I am not a big fan of it personally, but many of my classmates in college liked it and it was enthusiastically recommended by several of our instructors.

Here is how you use it if you are a first-time user:

1. Visit www.rikai.com, or skip ahead to #3 if you clicked on my link above (the word 'Rikai')
2. Go to the right of the page where there is a drop-down menu. Click on "Japanese to English".
3. The Japanese-to-English version of Rikai should now load. Bookmark this.
4. Copy and paste the URL of a Japanese website you need help translating into the box on the left. (example: http://www5.ocn.ne.jp/~hbgc/)
5. Click on "GO."
6. You should now be taken to the site within Rikai (example)
   
   Everything is still in Japanese ... however!
7. If you hover over words which Rikai recognizes, it will tell you their meaning in English.
8. Sometimes Rikai provides undesirable readings (example: ３日目 should read "the 3rd day" but is instead broken down into three separate words)
9. But often Rikai will correctly grab characters which go together to form longer words and it will give the appropriate English meanings (example: へらぶな書店情報 means "Hellabunna Bookshop Information" and both "bookstore" and "information" are correctly recognized and translated.

Rikai does not expressly require any knowledge of how to read Japanese characters, but truthfully it requires more knowledge of Japanese than WWWJDIC does. I say this because Rikai will frequently only translate the root of verbs (e.g. 言 in 言った or 作 in 作られた) and will not tell you what tense they are in. It assumes that you already know Japanese grammar perfectly (or near-perfectly) and only helps you to decode unfamiliar kanji, be they nouns, verbs, adjectives, whatever. This could result in inaccurate translations if, for example, you asked Rikai to translate 真面目に and it only highlighted 真面目 and told you "hard-working, diligent, earnest" and did not tell you that 真面目に is the adverbial form, i.e. "diligently".

The personal problems I have with Rikai are:

1. I think it provides too much of a crutch which JSL learners are likely to rely upon in lieu of really learning how to read the characters, and
2. I dislike the advertisements at the top of the screen, and
3. I dislike that it can only recognize (what seem to be) random words. Some katakana words like ページ or イベント it can read, but others like ギャラリーページ ("Gallery Page") it cannot. This is probably because it cannot tell that ギャラリー is one word while ページ is another, and so Rikai's engine looks for the word ギャラリーページ in its massive wordbank and returns no result. Even worse than this, however, is when Rikai does not grab any text at all! For example, it won't grab the menu items on this page nor will it translate ANY of the text on this page! Even though the text is obviously legitimate text and not just an image!

If you don't mind these inconveniences, then you may find that Rikai is immensely beneficial, especially if you need to navigate text-heavy sites like Getchu or Japanese weblogs. In the end, it all boils down to the individual's own needs and desires.

Review:
Easy to use? 5/5
Powerful tool? 3/5, requires users to hover over words, doesn't translate all words
Flexible tool? n/a (rigid by design)
Do I use it often? 1/5, I never use it
Is the server reliable? n/a (I have no clue)
Is the site still maintained and update? n/a (I have no clue)
Overall: ★★★

 

[guy]

A few that I've come across:

KanjiConverer - http://nihongo.j-talk.com/parser/
Converts kanji into furigana components (eg: 漢字→かんじ/ka-n-ji) to aid in reading for those with limited or no knowledge of kanji. Also supports other related conversions. Basic conversions are pretty good, but I have not tested it extensively. Potential usage: converting Japanese lyrics to romaji (eg: if you're inclined to sing-along).

Tae Kim's Japanese Guide to Japanese Grammar - http://www.guidetojapanese.org/
A solid, concise overview of the basic components and structure of Japanese grammar. If you're starting out, this should be a good resource for learning the basics. For those taking formal classes (eg: in college), this is a nice reference. It is not extensive and there aren't many idioms or colloquialisms covered, but the explanations are quite clear.

RikaiChan - http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/
A well-known Firefox extension. Adds tooltip-style popup translations on Japanese pages by simply mousing over Japanese words. Some extra study features as well. While there is no support for specialty dictionaries, the basic covers much of what you'll encounter on the web. RikaiChan provides word translations, not sentence translations, therefore it's better suited for those with at least basic grammar and simply need assistance with vocabulary.

PeraPera-Kun - http://perapera.wordpress.com/perapera-kun/
Alternative to RikaiChan. Supposed to be more up-to-date than RikaiChan, but some users have had problems. Give it a try if you're not happy with RikaiChan.

StarDict - http://stardict.sourceforge.net/
Much like RikaiChan and PeraPera-Kun, but StarDict runs as a separate program and can therefore translate Japanese text from any running Windows program, such as Outlook (Japanese emails), WinNY, various 2ch readers, and so on. StarDict was working to provide popup translations straight off of Japanese text displayed in Firefox 2, but it hasn't been working since FF3 -- although you can still copy and paste text. However, unlike RikaiChan and PeraPera-Kun, StarDict supports custom dictionaries (proper names, scientific, medical, etc) as well as dozens of languages, making it a versatile tool. But since you can add almost any kind of dictionary, there's no guarantee that the dictionaries you add are any good; so if you don't know which one to get, you can easily end up with poor translations.




My other suggestion: PocketPCs (Windows Mobile devices) are actually relatively popular in Japan, and as such, there is active development of Japanese-English programs. Installation can be tricky so I won't provide any links (there are a lot of websites that claim to have the correct way to install them, but in my experience it's best to handle it case by case), but here are some descriptions of the tools:

LetsJapan and IME-JP
Adds Japanese display and input capability for Windows Mobile/PocketPC devices. This includes being able to read Japanese emails, webpages, etc. You can also write in Japanese as you would on your Windows PC. For touchscreen devices, it also adds Japanese handwriting (full kana/kanji recognition, although it is stroke-based), meaning you can simply handwrite in Japanese to input. See below:

JWPce and dictionaries
Much like StarDict for the PC, JWPce brings a solid dictionary experience to the PocketPC mobile device. You can add custom dictionaries (proper names, conjugations, idioms, etc). Where this shines is with the handwriting input: if you encounter unknown kanji eg on a sign or in a manga, you can simply handwrite it (using the above input) into JWPce and quickly get the reading and vocabulary translation.



I am personally an advocate of Windows Mobile for this reason. Currently I use a Windows Mobile phone (with a data plan on my carrier), and I am able to easily write and translate any kanji I encounter, search the web for Japanese information, enter Japanese addresses into Google Maps, as well as all the usual communication functions -- all from one device. Of course, not everyone needs this flexibility, or even any Japanese resources outside of the classroom or home, so don't go rushing out to buy a PocketPC. However, if you are seriously commited to JSL, and might even spend some time in Japan, I think it can be a solid investment, one which can be much more valuable than a typical denshi-jisho.