While I was at my local Mitsuwa (Asian market, basically) I picked up a Japanese version of the Xbox 360 magazine. Now, I heard sometimes these magazines have furigana for the kanji. Unfortunately this does not. I still hope to get a lot of sentences out of the magazine, so is there some way to help figure out the kanji or what not, and can then get a kana translation?

Probably not, but thought I might as well ask. Thanks.

There are programs that can convert images to text, but they are hard to find, expensive, and pretty iffy.

Sorry, but it looks like you'll need to find an easier magazine to start with.

(IME, not many good magazines have furigana... You're going to have to find one aimed at kids, and those are usually pretty lame.)

There is some program online that lets you draw the kanji then pulls it up for you. It is probably the same speed than if you looked it up according to stroke order.

You could also (assuming you recognized keyword of the kanji) quickly pull it up on this site copy and paste. Again all of these options are time consuming.

The DS solves this problem.

find a program that lets you look up kanji by radical.

IME the only way to look up readings of kanji like this which is at all tolerable for anything more than occasional use is to have something which lets you input kanji by writing them with a stylus. Higher end electronic dictionary, Nintendo DS with suitable software, or something similar. Anything else is just too much pain for regular use.

Both the Windows and OSX IME have handwriting recognition too. You don't need to go buy a DS.

(Windows via mouse, OSX via multitouch)

I find this to be the easiest way to look up unknown kanji:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-b...dic.cgi?1R

However, if you have to look up almost every kanji I would suggest getting back at your magazine later when you have a bigger vocab.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Both the Windows and OSX IME have handwriting recognition too. You don't need to go buy a DS.

(Windows via mouse, OSX via multitouch)

When I said 'stylus' I meant it -- mouse doesn't cut it unless you've got a wacom tablet or something :-) Not tried multitouch input; maybe it would work, maybe not... It's not about whether you can do it at all, but whether it's quick, intuitive and easy enough for regular, intensive use.

wccrawford Wrote:There are programs that can convert images to text, but they are hard to find, expensive, and pretty iffy.

Actually, I've found the OCR software that comes free with some HP printer/scanners works pretty well for Japanese. It's not anywhere near perfect, of course, but it will save you quite a bit of looking-up and typing.


I have a bit of experience with looking up kanji from magazines without the help of OCR software, and it's a pretty time-intensive process if there are a lot you're not familiar with. But if it's something you're really interested in (in my case, interviews with my favorite actor), it can be worth it. I've used the handwriting input on the Windows IME and the search-by-radicals look-up on the Jim Breen dictionary.

pm215 Wrote:When I said 'stylus' I meant it -- mouse doesn't cut it unless you've got a wacom tablet or something :-) Not tried multitouch input; maybe it would work, maybe not... It's not about whether you can do it at all, but whether it's quick, intuitive and easy enough for regular, intensive use.

Multitouch works perfectly. It's like writing the kanji on the palm of your hand with your finger. Drawing with the mouse in windows is crap, but I suppose if you wanted to make regular use of the feature you could pick up a tablet for pretty cheap (cheaper than a ds+sonomama) anyways. You'd also have the benefit of having the kanji displayed on your computer where it could be copy&pasted into a dictionary app or whatever else you were planning on doing.

It's okay, I'll probably translate it some other time. As of this moment, at least it's a novelty. I should have figured as much, so my mistake regardless. I did order Kanji Odyssey 2001 yesterday, so that should keep me busy with sentences which was my ultimate goal.

I use JWPce for this kind of thing. The dictionary and the radical search mainly.

Here are some options:
If you know a word that uses the kanji in the word you're looking for, you can type that into a dictionary, and the word you're looking for will probably be in the results.
Ex You're looking up 縮小　and you know 小さい but you don't know anything for 縮. Type 小さい into the dicitonary, remove the okurigana and search.
If you know 縮める, type this after 小, remove the okurigana, then you can search for 縮小 directly.

If you don't have have anything to go on(new kanji, don't know any words for it), then you can draw it into IME, or use a radical search to find it. Select the radicals your mystery kanji has to narrow it down. You can narrow it down further by entering the stroke number too. Then tranfer it to the dictionary

Just a quick question I'm going to post here so I do not clutter up the forums.

I've heard talk about something for Mozilla which, when mousing over kanji, allows you to see the kana. I might decide to translate some of those Japanese stories stickied at the top for practice.

My problem is I use Google Chrome, not Mozilla. Also, I clearly do not know what the add-on is called. Is there an equivalent for Chrome? Or can the same add-on work on Chrome?

Thanks.

This add-on for Mozilla Firefox is called rikaichan.

@Vinchenzo:

I think the add-on is called Rikaichan, and it's available here: http://polarcloud.com/rikaichan

As for it working in Chrome, it appears Chrome is in the early stages of accepting extensions. Maybe Rikaichan's developer will port it, or Chrome will be able to accept Mozilla add-ons natively. Until then, you can use rikai.com which is essentially the same thing except it doesn't pick up on all-kana words.

There's also Wakan, which has a system-wide Rikaichan-like popup info box. But it's probably a bit heavy for just reading websites.