Kindle Dictionary for free (limited time): Japanese-English, German, French and Name

[keynya]

I have been using the various available Japanese - English dictionaries for the Kindle for some time. Unfortunately, I was unhappy with their usability. Therefore, I made my own ones over the summer. They can be used like the built-in dictionaries for fast look-up and inline translations on the Kindle paperwhite and the Kindle apps on iOS. After testing and optimizing them for several weeks, I think they are ready to be released to the public:

Japanese -> English:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FD9549A
http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B00FD9549A

It is based on the JMdict and tatoeba project and features:

- more than 170,000 entries
- 50,000 example sentences illustrate the use of the word
- fast look-up for all entries
- all entries are indexed in Kanji and Hiragana/Katakana
- part-of-speech information

I have been carefully designing the entries, such that the important
information are clearly visible, which are the reading of the Kanji and
its translation to English.

I also made a Japanese German dictionary (smaller index):

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FD956JI
http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B00FD956JI

and a Japanese French dictionary (smaller index):

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FE08SHS
http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B00FE08SHS


For people having problems identifying names in Japanese texts (i.e. me), I made a dictionary of Japanese names of people, places and companies:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FD95274/
http://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/B00FD95274/


They will be free over the weekend (Friday until Sunday). As the file size is quite large, amazon does not allow me to give them away for free indefinitely. I hope these dictionaries will be useful for you and you will enjoy them. If you have any questions or comments, please ask here.

[bubblepop]

Would it in any way be possible to provide a German --> Japanese translation dictionary?

[keynya]

As I am a German speaker myself and have many Japanese friends who try to read German books, I was thinking of doing something like this. Unfortunately I have not found the perfect source to make a proper German -> Japanese dictionary. Because it is not so easy to just reverse the languages in a dictionary.

But now that you ask, I will have a look at it again. If I get it running, I will tell you. But I think it will take a few weeks at least.

[bubblepop]

Originally Posted by keynya

As I am a German speaker myself and have many Japanese friends who try to read German books, I was thinking of doing something like this. Unfortunately I have not found the perfect source to make a proper German -> Japanese dictionary. Because it is not so easy to just reverse the languages in a dictionary.

But now that you ask, I will have a look at it again. If I get it running, I will tell you. But I think it will take a few weeks at least.

That would be such a saviour! The only project that recently started that I know of is at dokuwa a sister project if wadoku.. but I believe they actually want to write the dictionary themselves as a 2.0 community.

[bubblepop]

How is the project coming along?

[keynya]

For the last weeks I have been caught up in another project, a Kanji Dictionary, therefore I have only seen your post now. I think I will be able to finish the Kanji Dictionary in the next 10 days. Due to this I have not started any work on the German -> Japanese dictionary. But I have looked into different data sources for the German -> Japanese translation. Thank you for pointing me to the dokuwa project, I did not know this one. I think it will be possible to build such a dictionary. I do not know how reliable the results will be, but I will try to make one and then I can see how good it works, and you can test it as well.

Are you a German speaker who wants to use this dictionary to translate words from German to Japanese? Or are you a Japanese speaker who wants to read German books? Because I would try to make this dictionary with a focus on non German speakers, i.e. including conjugation of verbs, etc. So it might be that there will be too much info for a German speaker.

Are you using a Kindle Paperwhite, or do you want to use it on iOS or Android? Because it will easily work on the Paperwhite and iOS. The Kindle software for Android is quite limited and one needs a bit of a workaround to get custom dictionaries running on them.

[bubblepop]

Oh that's good news! I'm excited about this

I'm a German speaker myself, but the dictionary is for my Japanese friends who are learning German. The kindle paperwhite has the best on-the-fly translation dictionary function from what I've tested, so the paperwhite dictionary would be my main aspiration. iOS would also be excellent - and for that matter even a MacOS Dictionary that works with the built-in OS dictionary look-up system. (I'll promote your apps in my facebook!)

Regarding the complexity and layout of the dictionary, from my experience reading a foreign language on my kindle, I'd recommend it to be compact and more of a translation dictionary. I find1 that I usually just glance at the translation and continue reading, as for an advanced dictionary look-up they all have their Casios ^^

You're a savior!!

[keynya]

A little update on the project:

Last week I tried to work with a first database (Wiktionary), but it is horrible to process in a good way and the number of German to Japanese translations is quite limited (<7000 translations).

Then I wrote to the guys from the DokuWa project. And they will send me the raw data from their Database. As soon as I will get it, I will compile an ebook. I will see how the Kindle software handles the German Language: Verb conjugation is quite a bit more complicated than in Japanese. So, I will have to test if the Kindle can handle this out of the box, or if I have to give it more guidance to find all the words.

[bubblepop]

That's great news! I'll be the first dude buy it!

[bubblepop]

Regarding your Japanese English dictionary, would mind considering compiling a more compact translation dictionary? I would find it very useful if the first entry would show the most common furigana reading and the most common 2, 3 translations. If those don't suffice one could scroll down to see the main fictional entry. Maybe a format something like this:

'furigana'
.
.space
.
.

'eng1, eng2' #for advanced readers even this could be placed in the 'scroll to view' area.
.
.
.
.scroll down to see
.
.'full dictionary entry'


It would make the reading flow more fluent..

[bubblepop]

Hey there, I guess you've been quite busy.. just checking in. What do you think of the compact format for reading?

[bubblepop]

Actually, I wonder if the translation dictionary would even need a full dictionary entry. Leaving that part out might speed up the lookup..wouldn't it?

[bubblepop]

Hey there! I was wondering how the German --> Japanese Dictionary is coming along. I want to get my girlfriend reading books to built her vocabulary on the kindle paperwhite