Furigana Toggle (Firefox Addon)

This addon will let you toggle furigana on pages that have it embedded. That is of only limited use as a lot of sites in Japanese won’t have furigana embedded. Generally speaking, IPA furigana (Firefox, Chrome), which adds furigana to pages that don’t already have it supported, would be the better alternative but that only allows you to toggle the furigana on and … [ Read more ]

IPA furigana (Firefox Addon)

This is a port of the useful and popular Chrome extension for Firefox. It looks up the readings for kanji words and inserts them as furigana.

IPA furigana (Chrome Extension)

A browser extension allowing the injection of phonetic annotations for Japanese text (furigana) on the fly. Uses the IPADIC Japanese dictionary.

  • Works locally in your browser – no external server required
  • Automatically detects pages where furigana insertion is possible
  • Can switch between displaying the readings as hiragana, katakana or romaji
  • Persistent mode – extension will add furigana to all pages automatically until turned off
  • Customizable

[ Read more ]

Rikaikun (Chrome Extension)

Rikaikun is a port of the popular Rikaichan Firefox browser addon (now supplanted by Rikaichamp) for Chrome. Install it and you can easily translate Japanese by hovering over words (they’ll be translated in a pop up). If you hit shift/enter, you’ll see some information about the first Kanji.

Rikaichamp (Firefox Addon)

If you’ve been around a while you may remember the fantastic Rikaichan browser extension. That is no longer supported but this is a successor to it. Install this if you use Firefox to look up Japanese words with the hover of a mouse.

After enabling the add-on from the toolbar (or press Alt+R) simply hover over Japanese text and a popup displays corresponding dictionary definitions. Use … [ Read more ]

How I Use My Kindle

Harvey at JapanNewbie.com talks about using his Kindle to read Japanese.

How To Type (Hidden) Special Characters In Japanese

I’m guessing a lot of you know how to type in Japanese (hint: you don’t need a Japanese keyboard), but did you know about all the “hidden” special characters you can type out while you’re in Japanese input mode? You aren’t only limited to hiragana, katakana, romaji, and kanji. There are a score of other weird characters you can use to make your text a … [ Read more ]

Japanize

Japanize is a Firefox plugin which translates popular English websites into Japanese. [Hat tip to Nihongojouzu.com]

Denshijisho research

Lynne Fiona Donaldson offers her analysis and thoughts about selecting an electronic dictionary. It mostly covers Canon models and was written several years ago I think, but it seems to be still relevant and useful.

Japanese Text

Jonathon Delacour offers a blog post on reading/writing Japanese with various computer systems and with Movable Type blog software.

The Tanaka Corpus

The Tanaka Corpus consists of roughly 180,000 parallel Japanese-English sentences and is the basis of the example sentences found in the WWWJDIC dictionary server. It is freely available at this site for you to use in any projects you may wish.

Nintendo DS, kanji dictionary

This article discusses dictionary software for Nintendo DS, specifically Kanji Sono Mama Rakubiki Jiten (漢字そのまま楽引辞典).

rikaichan

Another reason to migrate to Firefox – rikaichan, from Polarcloud.com , is a Firefox extension that displays a popup showing the English definition of Japanese words as your cursor passes over them. Enabled/disabled with a simple right mouse-click rikaichan is the perfect companion when you browse the 新聞、朝日新聞 or 日経新聞 online. But there’s more. Installing rikaichan puts a Lookup a Word item in the Tool menu – click … [ Read more ]

Japanese-English Electronic Dictionaries (denshi jisho)

This is probably the best article I have read covering that tricky item the denshi-jisho. You will get an introduction and learn about necessary and nice-to-have features.

This article will be especially useful for those considering the Canon or Sharp series as it breaks down all the models and their features and offers a comparison of the two brands. You will also find the following … [ Read more ]