I've been trying to talk up the Firefox addon LanguageBob around here a bit but up until now it didn't support Japanese. However, I've recently been in correspondence with the program's author who has graciously made a Japanese version.

LanguageBob produces a diglot weave within a webpage, meaning it replaces some words with a second language equivalent. It is similar to Kanjilish except the whole word is substituted and it does not use the Heisig meaning, rather it uses the English equivalent. Two versions are available in the options, Japanese and PlusEnglish.

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A Japanese sample text:

William IV (1765–1837) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of Hanover from 26 6月 1830 until his 彼の死. William, the third son of George III and younger brother and successor to George IV, was the last king and penultimate monarch of the House of Hanover. He served in the Royal Navy in his youth and was, both 〜の間 his reign and afterwards, nicknamed the Sailor King. He served in 北米 and the Caribbean, but saw little actual fighting. Since his two older brothers died 〜なしで leaving surviving legitimate issue, he inherited the throne when he was sixty-four years old. His reign saw いくつかの reforms: the poor law was updated, child labour restricted, slavery abolished throughout the British Empire, and the Reform Act 1832 refashioned the British electoral system. Though William did not engage in politics as much as his 弟 or his 彼の父, he was the last monarch to appoint a Prime Minister contrary to the 意志 of Parliament. At his 彼の死 William had no surviving legitimate children, though he was survived by eight of the ten illegitimate children he had by the popular actress, Dorothea Bland.

A PlusEnglish sample text:

William IV (1765–1837) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of Hanover from 26 6月[june] 1830 until 彼の死[his death]. William, the third son of George III and younger brother and successor to George IV, was the last king and penultimate monarch of the House of Hanover. He served in the Royal Navy in his youth and was, both 〜の間[during] his reign and afterwards, nicknamed the Sailor King. He served in 北米[north america] and the Caribbean, but saw little actual fighting. Since his two older brothers died 〜なしで[without] leaving surviving legitimate issue, he inherited the throne when he was sixty-four years old. His reign saw いくつかの[several] reforms: the poor law was updated, child labour restricted, slavery abolished throughout the British Empire, and the Reform Act 1832 refashioned the British electoral system. Though William did not engage in politics as much as 弟[his brother] or 彼の父[his father], he was the last monarch to appoint a Prime Minister contrary to 意志[the will] of Parliament. At 彼の死[his death] William had no surviving legitimate children, though he was survived by eight of the ten illegitimate children he had by the popular actress, Dorothea Bland.

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So how to set it up? First you will need the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Then you need to download the Firefox addon LanguageBob from here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8409

It's still in the experimental stage so you will need to login to download it. Then go here to download the special Japanese DICT file:

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?nwdcvzdjtj2

Now you need to replace the regular DICT file with the new Japanese one. If you replace the regular file then LanguageBob will no longer be able to be used with French, Spanish, Chinese etc. because Japanese hasn't been officially added yet. This Japanese DICT file is just Japanese for us to try out.

For Windows users you need to find the original DICT file which should be here:

C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\somethingsomething.default\extensions\languagebar@sibers.com\components

You need to replace the DICT file in LanguageBob with the Japanese DICT file that you got from Mediafire. Restart Firefox and you'll see the little LanguageBob head in the status bar down the bottom. You will have to select Japanese in the Options box by right clicking the little head. Included is Japanese and PlusEnglish, that gives the English translation afterwards. You can also set the density of the changed text and other settings like pages not to translate.

The LanguageBob website:

http://www.languagebob.com/Pages/Default.aspx

Try it and if you like it perhaps leave a comment on the Firefox addons page so the authors can get the program out of the experimental stage.

Wow, the output is amazingly awful

Referring to a king as 彼 repeatedly, and the king's dad as 父(ちち), and bluntly referring to the king's death with 彼の死
〜なしで is not a word, it is a grammatical construct, 〜の間 is also weirdly placed
弟 doesn't mean brother, it means younger brother
意志 means something more along the lines of willpower, not the wants/desires of X (the parliament)

I can't see what kind of positive impact this would have. It doesn't teach the nuance of words, how to use them, or the kinds of context that they appear in. Why not just read actual Japanese text at your level instead? I could only see this working if the words that were to be replaced were hand picked to be extremely close to the closest English equivalent.

It looks like a interesting program, but it's definitely not a language learning tool.
It might be a kanji learning tool, but flashcards are faster.

Well of course it works much better with more closely related languages such as French. I've been using it for French and it is a lot more correct. The structure of Japanese is really not in its favour.

I think just replacing nouns would be a lot more use, definitely not grammatical particles because of the bad placement. I'm not sure what dictionary, if any, the author used. Also perhaps my choice of text was not very natural, I suppose any other context of 'father' would warrant a 'chichi'.

Later versions will iron out some kinks perhaps. A version which could only replace verbs or only replace nouns or something like that would be better for Japanese.

Here's some Alice in Wonderland for your consideration.

------------------------ Japanese only

`Then you should say what you mean,' the 3月 Hare went on.

`I do,' Alice hastily replied; `at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the 同じ thing, you know.'

`Not the 同じ thing a bit!' said the Hatter. `You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the 同じ thing as "I eat what I see"!'

`You might just as well say,' added the 3月 Hare, `that "I like what I get" is the 同じ thing as "I get what I like"!'

`You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, `that "I breathe when I sleep" is the 同じ thing as "I sleep when I breathe"!'

`It is the 同じ thing with you,' said the Hatter, and here the 会話 dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn't much.

The Hatter was the 最初の to break the 静寂. `What day of the 月 is it?' he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of his 彼のポケット, and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.

----------------------------------- Japanese Plus English

`Then you should say what you mean,' the 3月[march] Hare went on.

`I do,' Alice hastily replied; `at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the 同じ[same] thing, you know.'

`Not the 同じ[same] thing a bit!' said the Hatter. `You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the 同じ[same] thing as "I eat what I see"!'

`You might just as well say,' added the 3月[march] Hare, `that "I like what I get" is the 同じ[same] thing as "I get what I like"!'

`You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, `that "I breathe when I sleep" is the 同じ[same] thing as "I sleep when I breathe"!'

`It is the 同じ[same] thing with you,' said the Hatter, and here 会話[the conversation] dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn't much.

The Hatter was the 最初の[first] to break 静寂[the silence]. `What day of 月[the month] is it?' he said, turning to Alice: he had taken his watch out of 彼のポケット[his pocket], and was looking at it uneasily, shaking it every now and then, and holding it to his ear.

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I like the idea of the '3月 Hare'.

"until his 彼の死."

Lol, no thanks.

Thanks to your comments I don't have to be sad that it isn't available for Linux.

Wow, no thanks. Switching between languages like that is powerfully painful.

And I don't see it helping any, since you'd have to already know the words to use the no-english version (and Anki is better for that) and you wouldn't read the Japanese on the english-added version because your mind will just jump right to it.

Edit: Also, context means everything in Japanese. This thing will never have the ability to choose between polite/non-polite forms accurately.

Seems like an awesome plug-in... to torture people with! Really, I already thought that kanjilish was bad, but it's nothing compared to that.

Really, if you want to be sure to learn everything wrong, it seems perfect.

I think it is a nice Idea, like Kanjiish, but both not for normal Internetsurfing.

Hi, LanguageBob here.

??? Let the community take control of the LanguageBob dictionaries to make them better ???

Thanks for your comments ... particularly the brutally honest: "Wow, the output is amazingly awful"

I don't speak Japanese but I imagine many of the comments are justified.

The system works well between most European languages. Chinese was done for fun and the Japanese in response to a specific request from one of your members. It was done as a trial. It looks as if it could be easily improved upon :-)

Phauna made the suggestion that the community could create the dictionary so that the quality of translations would improve. This sounds like a great idea. If someone is prepared to do this I can help them.

With an improved dictionary it should be a powerful tool to help you. There are limits to what it can do but it will certainly help embed what you learn.

Wishing you all the best,
Louis (AKA LanguageBob)

Cool that you came and read the responses and accepted them. You could have just as easily come here and tell us our criticismｓ are retarded and no one would want to help, some other people on this forum has done so in the past... >_>

I think the dictionary idea is a good one and I could see myself helping out with such a project.

I do think that some people here could use a little kindness when expressing their opinions. If I were an author or supporter of the thing, I would have probably felt dejected. It's not like they make errors on purpose, if they make any.
No one asked for my opinion, but well, not everyone here appears to put a limit in what they say.

Haha, I got caught there. I have googled some of my own software in the past and I've sometimes found some harsh truths about it on unsuspecting forums too. It can hurt but it's also a great way to get really honest opinions so I hope LanguageBob took it that way. And my opinion isn't about the software itself which may be very well written for all I know, but the resulting text.

I still stand by my opinion, though. As it is, for Japanese, using it would do more harm than good. Now, only with words that have very clear one to one translation it could kind of work. But those words are only a very small subset of the vocabulary. So I don't think that would be very useful either.

The idea seems nice in theory, but I'm afraid it's a false good idea.

Genuine thanks to both of you!

I'm still standing ... what was posted was a draft in an experimental version ... so I'm not overly attached to it.

... more importantly I've created a new template dictionary that could form the basis of a good dictionary for Japanese LanguageBob. This needs someone who understands Japanese to take it further.

Following Phauna's advise I've created one with just Nouns. This is cloned from a successful list of nouns for European languages. They are concrete nouns, i.e. the word tend to refer to a single type of object. (We accept water because it usually means a type of liquid but reject table because it could be a list in a book or what goes with a chair). For European languages I then filtered it through different translations engines and where the translation was differing I then rejected them. Lastly I went through them line by line. Needless to say I haven't done this for Japanese!

I'm having some technical problems but should over the next couple of days be able to upload a version of more reliable nouns. (The downside is that there will be less words translated per page - but it should still be helpful to you).

All the best,
Louis
(AKA LanguageBob)

Hi,
I've created a dictionary that just does nouns. 746 of the 2000 most commonly used English nouns were chosen for being ususally unambiguous in their meaning.

Because of this it should give fairly accurate translations (within reason - I don't speak Japanese). However, it also means that much fewer translations are made. There may not even be a translation per page.

However, it could form the start of an excellent and accurate dictionary for you.
I've included levels with and without the English translation.

It is hosted here:

http://www.mediafire.com/?z5atjnuijem

You need to replace the Dict file in LanguageBob with this new file. (You may also have to select Japanese in the Options). The Dict.dat file is in the components folder of your Mozilla ususally at:

C:\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\somethingsomething.default\extensions\languagebar@sibers.com\components

For those of you who need to download Languagebob you can find it here:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8409


If someone is interested in coordinating a community generated dictionary I can help them out with various dictionaries, dictionary editor, etc. (Not speaking/reading Japanese I can't do it myself - but my little experience with it suggests that LangugeBob could be very useful in embedding and reinforcing the language).


All the best,
LanguageBob