Hi guys,

I'm a big big fan of the firefox add-on, Rikaichan. For those of you who are unfamiliar, it is a roll-over dictionary. Don't know a word you're reading? Just turn on Rikaichan and put your cursor beside the word, and it does a, usually, really good job of figuring out what word you're talking about and giving you several English definitions.

Lately, though, I've been doing all of my manual look-ups in my スーパー大辞林 on my Canon Wordtank, which is monolingual.

I was thinking, it would be really awesome if I could still use Rikaichan, but instead of English definitions popping up, Japanese definitions would pop up.

So, I come here to ask: do any of you know how this might be accomplished?

On the rikaichan site, you can download Japanese to English, French, Russian, and German...

I honestly don't have the first clue about how this might be accomplished, but I would really love to have a roll-over monolingual dictionary.

Well, there aren't any free monolingual dictionaries, so you would either have to buy one or obtain it through some other method. Then there is the issue of converting it into a format that can be used by rikaichan. Perhaps someone might be able to write something that could convert an epwing dictionary into a format readable by rikaichan... but, there is also the possibility that such a dictionary might have to be fully converted by hand... which means it might never be done.

Check out this thread for something similar. It doesn't seem to work with conjugations, though, which sucks.

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=4299

Too lazy to link, but try looking up our posts about StarDict.

Or here's a cpl:

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...0#pid80830
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...6#pid81336
(Fixed link malfunction.)

http://japanesemyway.com/tools/rikaichan...h-glosses/

IceCream Wrote:thanks!!

ノー問題〜

Hey, are there any pop up dictionaries that are strictly monolingual, but provide a full definition?

The problem is there are no free-licensed Japanese monolingual dictionaries that I know of. If there were, we could definitely convert them. An alternative would be to get some cheaply licensed one and convert it, but individual copies of the tool would have to be paid for.

Update: just saw that the latest RikaiChan beta has moved to using SQLite for the dictionaries, which makes it relatively easy to convert from another format. Just need to get a good monolingual one to convert.

すげえ！

Blahah Wrote:Just need to get a good monolingual one to convert.

Wouldn't it be nice if some Japanese person put a bunch of EPWING dictionaries online?

I actually have more recent versions of 広辞苑 and 大辞林 epwing. 広辞苑 is over 2GB, way too big to work smoothly with a firefox plugin. I'll try doing 大辞林.

If you have a Mac, you can hold a key combination to get the monolingual dictionary to pop down and give a definition. It stopped working after upgrading from leopard to snow leopard, but maybe that was just some issue with me.

thermal Wrote:It stopped working after upgrading from leopard to snow leopard, but maybe that was just some issue with me.

Check this out: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=789457
It still works, but it's gotta be a Cocoa program (sorry, Firefox )
Basically, you open the Dictionary, go to the Preferences, and choose "Opens Dictionary panel" instead of "Opens Dictionary Application"
Then, go to System Preferences::Keyboard::Keyboard Shortcuts, and choose "Services"
Scroll down until you find "Look Up in Dictionary"
Check it on, and add a shortcut to it (mine is ctrl + option + D)

Then whenever you're in a Cocoa program, it works just fine.

thanks Asriel and thermal, that works great

Stardict for windows offers similar functionality. You'll need to convert some dictionaries using the stardict-editor. I think it converts quite a few formats.

OK so I've done some digging and I've now got basically every Japanese dictionary ever made in EPWING format. I think I can extract a text version from an EPWING dictionary and then import it to an existing rikaichan dictionary using the tool on the site for the new beta.

including the 2GB 広辞苑 that you were talking about? I can't imagine that would be all too practical.

Regardless, if you'd convert these and upload them (or just upload them) somewhere, that would be kind of amazing.

edit: or divulge the information as to where to attain "every japanese dictionary in epwing format"

edit2: I'm assuming that you're converting this to the edict format, correct? because that's what rikaichan uses.
If you could get this to work, I would be incredibly grateful, because of this link I just found:
http://www.qj.net/qjnet/nintendo-ds/edic...-v010.html
Because, who wouldn't love to have the 大辞林 etc. on their Nintendo DS?

I wasn't planning on converting them all for rikaichan, that would be a bit counter productive. I'm working on converting Daijirin to a text-based format first, then I'll see about getting it to EDICT format for rikaichan. Text to EDICT should be the easy part.

I can't tell you where to find those files, but I can tell you that I've got no idea what will happen if you follow this link >> http://bit.ly/9hIJtf
It's hugely unlikely that it's a torrent with 12GB of dictionary files, since I just randomly appended letters to the bit.ly domain.

Hey guys, I just wanted to bump this thread and share some of my findings:

This link will help you with turning EPWING dictionaries into text files and removing or replacing the gaiji: http://www.users.on.net/~luffy/diamonds/...e/pdic.php

Since the newest versions of rikaichan are using sqlite databases as the actual source for all of the lookups that it performs, I think it would be best to focus on how to get these EPWING dictionaries into CSV files with the same table structure that is used by rikaichan which follows:

ｋａｎｊｉ　　　ｋａｎａ　　　ｅｎｔｒｙ

お握り　　　　　おにぎり　　　　(n) rice ball
御握り　　　　　おにぎり　　　　(n) rice ball
　　　　　　　　おろおろ　　　　(adv,n,vs,on-mim) nervous/flustered/in a dither/all shook up/(P)

Notice how each word with multiple kanji readings has an entry for each reading.
Also notice how multiple definitions are seperated by a / character in the entry column.

If you're familiar with sqlite you can find the dictionaries that rikaichan uses by searching your C drive for "dict.sqlite" if you aren't all that familiar with sqlite then download the "sqlite database browser" from sourceforge and take a look at the files.

I'm not sure how rikaichan handles multiple records with the same kana and kanji fields. So this may be an issue if you want a single huge database with all your dictionaries. I don't see how having separate databases for each dictionary would be a issue, since rikaichan already does this.

I'm also not sure how rikaichan will handle a record where an English word is in the kana field. This might, or might not, be an issue if you want to convert an English monolingual dictionary or an English to Japanese dictionary.

I'll post details on how to convert the EPWING dictionaries into CSV files with the proper formatting (if I manage to figure it all out). If you just want the files that I end up producing, I could post a googledocs link as well.

You can take off the English definitions with rikichan now, not monolingual in the sense(meaning providing definitions but in japanese, but it does provide just the reading which helps either way)

In my honest opinion, to get to the next level in japanese. Is to get really used to monolingual dictionaries and the need to go away from translations.

Translations aren't bad at all, i still use them but I've basically entered that "phase" of all japanese sentences,vocab>explaining in japanese. My understanding has jumped to higher levels thanks to this.

Ok, I've made some breakthroughs on my way to reformatting some wonderful monolingual dictionaries into some easily digestible sqlite waffles for rikaichan!

I've got several dictionaries converted to text. I've got some epwing gaiji to unicode character maps. I've even got PowerGREP! All I need to do is make some macros to tell PowerGREP to do hundreds of thousands of regular expression search-and-replaces with the gaiji to unicode maps, then format that into a rikaichan-friendly CSV, and finally import into a sqlite database for testing. It almost sounds easy doesn't it?

I'm starting with 新明解 第五版. It's smaller than the other epwing dictionaries and it only has about 355 unique gaiji, so it should be relatively simple to reformat.

After that I'll probably do 広辞苑 第五版 or スーパー大辞林 第二版. If anyone has any reasonable requests, I might do some more converting (If it's not impossible I'd love to eventually do the Kanji section of 広辞苑 and replace the kanji edict in rikaichan. There's a treasure trove of wonderful characters in there).

Wish me luck I guess... I have a feeling that many people on these forums would enjoy being able to use a good monolingual dictionary with rikaichan. I know I will.

I encourage you to keep working on this as it would indeed be very useful. I'd love to see Daijirin or 新明解 converted.

If you could create a Rikaichan-compatible 大辞林, it would be extremely awesome.

Using Rikaichan with 大辞林 for looking up words and creating Anki friendly text files with it would be great for seamlessly using monolingual definitions while reading interesting stuff in Japanese websites.

Ok, I ran into a little problem. I thought that I had the right epwing gaiji to unicode mappings for the dictionaries that I'm converting, but I didn't. I've found some new mappings for 新明解 that will work properly, so I can continue now. Turns out that the mappings I had before were for some random Chinese dictionaries.

Also I noticed that someone has developed a Python library for reading epwing dictionaries. I'm not familiar with Python, so I'm not in a position to utilize it, but maybe someone else could...

Link to the library: http://github.com/aehlke/epywing

Hi! Here is the Shinmeikai in StarDict format:
http://www.multiupload.com/B9X47V8VUN

and its source, a kind of HTML:
http://www.multiupload.com/MEZ7MORROL

Maybe helps, although the I kept the gaiji as images.