I don't know whether this has been mentioned on a previous thread or not, I couldnt see it in Learning tools anyway.

This website allows you to browse any Japanese website with furigana placed over all the Kanji. An awesome little tool, you just copy and paste the address of the page you wanna view!

Hiragana Megane

Take a look!

Thanks for the alert!

This is really helpful. Thanks for the post.

I swear there was a firefox extension that did the same thing.

That'd save the (minor) hassle of pasting web addresses, if you know where to find it, let us know.

zporkz Wrote:I swear there was a firefox extension that did the same thing.

There's even more than one such extension: moji and rikaichan.

jhuijts2 Wrote:

zporkz Wrote:I swear there was a firefox extension that did the same thing.

There's even more than one such extension: moji and rikaichan.

Ah they're both great, and I already use rikai chan, but its not the same thing, you have to hover your mouse over the words with those (a very small thing, yes yes, but it does interupt reading).

Rikaichan is probably better if you are already well into the reading stage and only need assistance with tougher kanji (and don't want the furigana, where you don't need them), but if your like me, and the majority of the on yomi still elude you, the site I mentioned above is really handy.

Ah, you want to have furigana on the entire page. In that case you can make a bookmarklet to alleviate the hellish pain of going to Hiragana Megane and copy/pasting the URL by hand! The following at least works in Firefox. Make a new bookmark in the toolbar folder (for easy access) and use this as location:

Code:

javascript:void(document.location='http://trans.hiragana.jp/ruby/'+
escape(document.location))

Now you can click on that bookmark and let Firefox fill in the URL for you

Wow, you totally opened my eyes to bookmarklets with. I used one before but I never gave it much thought. I looked up some examples on the net and there are a lot of incredible useful ones. Sorry for going OT but thanx for the info. 今照覧し[kana]rare[/kana]ます

jhuijts2 Wrote:

Code:

javascript:void(document.location='http://trans.hiragana.jp/ruby/'+
escape(document.location))

Now you can click on that bookmark and let Firefox fill in the URL for you

ahhh, awesome!! many thanks indeed!!

One nice thing about Hiragana Megane (over Moji, et al) is that you can print out your pages and read them away from the computer. Before my previous employer let my contract run out, I was able to print a few chapters of The Ruby Hacking Guide complete with furigana. At my present level of Japanese, that should keep me busy for 8-10 years!

Wow, that bookmarklet is extremely slick!

How about this one:

http://www.stackz.com/forum/index.php?topic=93.0

Both the Hiragana Megane website and that bookmarklet script are very cool! Great online reading tool!

The only sad part is when kanji are just images (like the tabs at the top of http://asahi.co.jp ), then of course this can't work. But regular text on the page has furigana. Wow!

Wonderful! Thanks. It is top of my favorites list now :-)

I recommend using the Furigana Injector. You can get the latest version from http://code.google.com/p/furigana-injector
Or from Firefox extensions site.

I'd recommend people not to use this. Furigana is a crutch you shouldn't rely on, it's way too easy to simply read the furigana and ignore the kanji.

I'm with Tobberoth. I even created a thread about this a while ago, but after some use and consideration, I decided it was nocive.

I read mostly short articles like the ones in slashdot.jp.

The practice I'm recurring now is this:

I read the article 2-3 times. Even if I understand fully on the first time. I try to use Rikai-chan only during the first time.
The size of the article is kinda critical. If it is too long, I'll lose interest. If is too short, It wont give me enought time to forget Rikai-chan's info and remember on my own.

If you are advanced in the readings of kanji then it could be a crutch. If you are not then it is a invaluable. I changed my homepage over to yahoo! japan having lacked confidence before for everyday tasks. Now I will get much more exposure.

I'm using the furigana injector plug-in for Firefox and am somewhat pleased.

For those that worry about it being a crutch, there's a list you can create to tell the plug-in not to add furigana to character's of your choice. As your list of kanji readings that you know well grows, start adding those to the list.

Not to mention, it is a man-made tool, thus you're going to get errors. Still, it can be just as useful as a good text to speech tool.

That's why I prefer rikaichan--you're in control of which words you get help for. That way, if I ought to know a kanji, I try to read it without help first.

Of course if I don't know it or I simply can't remember, there's no shame in then using rikaichan to help.

TerryS Wrote:Both the Hiragana Megane website and that bookmarklet script are very cool! Great online reading tool!

The only sad part is when kanji are just images (like the tabs at the top of http://asahi.co.jp ), then of course this can't work. But regular text on the page has furigana. Wow!

Rikaichan works on the ALT text of images.