Hi,

I recently switched back from mac to windows and I am looking for good software that assists with learning Japanese.

Specifically, I am looking for:

- Better ways to type Japanese. IME is pretty crappy out of the box on Windows 7
- An offline j-j dictionary
- A program to capture audio
- A way to improve the default Japanese font so that it doesn't look like ass (cleartype would help)

or anything else. (I have keyhole live station and tvants)

Cheers

Firstly I'd just like to congratulate you for making a wise choice for choosing a proper OS.

1. I'm not too sure.
2. http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=3674 good thread here, with a huge torrent pack with a bunch of j-j dicts.
3. Audiacity
4. There are other fonts around ill have to look them up for you though


oh edit: looks like the torrent file has been taken down :S

It is Audacity, not audiacity.

It would be a good idea to have sticky threads with compilations of software for the most common operative systems.

It's operating system, not operative system.

EDIT: After Googling it looks like some people do call it an "operative system"! Who knew?

EBWin seems to be a pretty good EPWING reader, although it has a couple weird issues, especially in Windows 7. I'd be interested if anyone has a better suggestion.

Try Google IME? It's free and supposedly better. I couldn't get it to work but I think I'm the only one. There's other cross-platform IME stuff out there, no?

Stardict: (BROKEN LINK) http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=99948#p99948

Audacity.

I wasn't going to respond to the last because you seem to have poor aesthetic taste and used a vulgarity. ;p But... I hate ClearType and the way similar styles look on other devices/OS/whatever, too blurry, hurts my eyes, and makes me nauseous, and I think the fonts look ugly with it, especially Meiryo or Meiro or whatever it's called. I just use different fonts that I think look good, probably the same as others... http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...1#pid35791

I'd be interested in other EPWING readers for WINDOWS 7 besides EBWin if anyone has any good experiences they would like to share.

Quote:I recently switched back from mac to windows

All I can think is "why???"

I'm a linux user personally, but I will admit os x is superior to windows.

I have imbued this post with a mystical power that somehow prevents all subsequent posts from becoming pointless OS wars.

Glad that's taken care of!

Thanks for the replies.

1. Thanks, will check out the google one.
2. Great, will check out those. Was hoping to avoid an EPWING reader, but will check em out. (The out of the box os x one is fantastic and integrates with Safari)
3. Yeah Audacity is ok, but I was hoping there is something as great as audio hijack pro.
4. Great, will check out the fonts in that thread.

ClearType was horrible in XP IMO, however it looks nice in windows 7 for English, but Japanese doesn't have it.

You could try Sony Sonic Soundforge
which isn't free, but easily freeable.

If it's complexity you want (not sure what more you can do for recording via Audacity), I don't know--but if it's simplicity, check out Free Sound Recorder. I actually rarely use Audacity, FSR opens faster for me with lower overhead and I just hit F9/F10 to start/stop recording, and it auto-saves mp3 to my HDD. No idea if Audacity already allows that but I like very light software if I have only a simple task.

As for 2, I really like Lingoes and it's multi-dictionary search, it has a lot of dictionaries also. Stardict is ok, but it didn't have as many dictionaries that I wanted.

I like Google's JP IME. Better than MS IME, in my opinion.

Bokusenou Wrote:As for 2, I really like Lingoes and it's multi-dictionary search, it has a lot of dictionaries also. Stardict is ok, but it didn't have as many dictionaries that I wanted.

Geez (another belated reply), how many dictionaries do you need? I DL'd like 20 .jp dictionaries but only use a handful. Of course, all of mine are legit, unlike these which would be immoral to acquire: (BROKEN LINK) http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=99948#p99948