Hello,

I was wondering if, having a wordlist, let's say on a .xls file, there was a way to generate a glossary/xls file that had on one column had the actual words of the wordlist and on the next one the dictionary entry taken from a stardict/goldendict/babylon/lingvo or whatever digital dictionary.
I am asking this specifically in order to make custom anki decks, but I think this type of problem could be common with anyone who wants to make sub-glossaries, such as the words present in one chapter of a textbook, or the words in a novel.
Cheers,

Clemens

Try "rikaichan" if you're using Firefox. It gives you a definition of kanji or kanjicompounds when you hover over it with your cursor. If you adjust the settings you can press "S" and the word/kanji gets saved into a text file in two neat columns. You can then transfer it to an excel sheet if you like. Oh and it also recognizes hiragana and katakana words.

[RawToast]

Perhaps JGlossator is what you want:
http://jglossator.sourceforge.net/

Epwing2Anki is a Windows program that takes a text file for vocabulary items as input and generates a TSV file that can be imported to Anki.

Or if you use OS X or GNU/Linux, you can paste something like this in a terminal application:

curl ftp://ftp.monash.edu.au/pub/nihongo/edict|iconv -f euc-jp -t utf-8>edict.txt;for w in $(<words.txt);do awk -v "v=$w" '$1==v' edict.txt;done

(Where words.txt contains one word per line.)

RawToast Wrote:Perhaps JGlossator is what you want:
http://jglossator.sourceforge.net/

For this kind of situation, I would use Epwing2Anki instead.

Thank you all for the nice replies.
Jglossator and Epwing2Anki are two pieces of software that were unknown to me and they both seem very useful.
Epwing2Anki especially seems to do exactly what I was looking for.
I would like to ask a secondary question in this regard: does anyone know how to convert stardict/babylon dictionaries to Epwing? Those are the main dictionaries I am using (although I also have many epwing ones)

The script solution is also very nice, but I am not sure hot to use it in case of CEDICT and KEDICT. I do use Debian, but unfortunately I am still just a beginner.
What should I do?