Japanese-English Kindle dictionary

[Snorkledorf]

But who learns a foreign language by reading a book in their native language and translating each word into the other one? That's backwards. You'd read a book in your target language and look up words as necessary.

The E->J dictionary covers the more common "I wonder what that word means..." situation.

[DuckieTigger]

Originally Posted by Snorkledorf

The E->J dictionary covers the more common "I wonder what that word means..." situation.

If learning a foreign language, the E->E would be a lot more helpful. It always helped me seeing it explained and shown in context rather than having it merely translated. In case the E->E was not helpful enough, select the more option and use the online anything to anything translation and "cheat". In school we were allowed to use the E->E dictionary all the time even in final exam - any translation dictionary (to and from english) was banned in exams.

[Kumabjorn]

Originally Posted by Snorkledorf

But who learns a foreign language by reading a book in their native language and translating each word into the other one? That's backwards. You'd read a book in your target language and look up words as necessary.

The E->J dictionary covers the more common "I wonder what that word means..." situation.

That is the traditional passive approach to language learning. You are the recipient of new words. Taking words, expressions, idioms etc. in your own mother tongue and transform that into a foreign language is the active approach, you start by learning to express yourself in the same manner you are used to in your own language.

[andrusz]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

Usually though there is a demand from Japanese users who want to learn English. That said, the Sony readers suffer from the same lack of dictionaries, don't know about the Kobo.

With Kobo the issue is similar, only J->J dictionary is available and active when you are reading Japanese books. No official J->E dictionary exists

[Kumabjorn]

Seems to bee available in Sweden. I will take it down later today and have a look. Pricing was odd, $8.04. As JDic gets updates will your dictionary also bee updated?

[Kumabjorn]

I took it down and installed it.
There are some problems.
First, you can't look up Japanese words directly in the dictionary. Without Hiragana transformation you are limited to Romaji words/
Secondly, after looking up words in a text, I used Natsume Soseki's Bochan, and backing out, the next lookup I try is limited to the first character, not the word. The Back key does something to the lookup algorithm.

[totsubo]

Kumabjorn, thanks for the comments, they are very helpful.

Which Kindle are you using? I have a Paperwhite and haven't found any issues.

A few questions on the problems you've encountered:

1-

you can't look up Japanese words directly in the dictionary

I've been able to do all of the the following:

• open the dictionary itself, use the search function, type 来る and I am taken to the correct entry.

• open a Japanese book, highlight a word and the dictionary entry pops up

• from the home screen, open the search tool, chose to search in 'dictionaries', type 帰る in the search box, and then tap the arrow next to the search box. I am taken to the correct entry in the dictionary. Note that this type of searching, by specifying to look in only dictionaries, only seems work if my Kindle is set with Japanese as the default language (which requires to rstart the device)

If you can describe the steps to reproduce your issue I will certainly try to address is.

2-

after looking up words in a text [...] and backing out, the next lookup I try is limited to the first character, not the word

I'm not sure I understand. When I look up a word I get the dictionary entry as a pop-up, the is no keyboard and I can't see any way to enter any text or use a backspace key.

And yes, I will publish new editions to incorporate changes to EDICT. But as you may know EDICT is updated daily, I won't be making a new edition every day

PS The reason for the odd pricing is probably because I set a base price in USD and amazon figures out the prices for other countries using the current daily exchange rate.

If you have any other questions/comments feel free to message me directly!

[Kumabjorn]

Sorry for the tardiness.
I'm using a Kindle generation 3 or Keyboard. Hence, I have a physical keyboard.
When I first tried it out and placed the cursor next to a Japanese word 不織布 it looked it up fine. Then I press the Back key to make the cursor disappear. When I then tried to look up a second word, a few pages later, it only did a search on the first Kanji it encountered. If this is due to page turns or Back key, I don't know. But after that it was the same, no matter which word I put the cursor on I only got the first Kanji of the word, and as you know, that is pretty useless capability.
I can't do any dictionary searches sine there is no built in support for Japanese in the K3. If it would be possible to support the kind of Romaji input that is available on www.jisho.org that would certainly enhance its usefulness. But the most important part is getting it to search for more than the first Kanji.

No, I don't expect to get daily EDICT updates, but perhaps every three months? Actually, the EDICT could do with a bit of editing since there are way too many double posts. But that would have to be done on a crowd sourced basis.

[mngalaxy]

Originally Posted by karunaji

I couldn't find any JP>EN dictionary for Kindle so I decided to make one myself.

You can download it from: http://www.latvianforyou.com/ebooks/...Dictionary.prc

It is converted from the free EDICT dictionary that is available from JMdict/EDICT project. More info at http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/edict_doc.html

No kana/kanji input is yet possible in Kindle therefore all headwords have been provided in romaji to enable quick lookup.

UPDATE: A new version has been made and can be downloaded. The changes are as follows:
- chōonpu (ー) now converted to duplicated vowel.
- some sentence examples added from the subset of Tanaka Corpus

I really love your dictionary. It helps me a lot in studying. Could you teach me how to create the Eng-Jap one? Cause sometime I need it for writing essays, and yours is Jap-Eng. Thank you very much

[totsubo]

Originally Posted by mngalaxy

I really love your dictionary. It helps me a lot in studying. Could you teach me how to create the Eng-Jap one? Cause sometime I need it for writing essays, and yours is Jap-Eng. Thank you very much

It's not possible to create the reverse. The source data file only goes from Japanese-> English.

You'd have to find a source data file that goes English -> Japanese.