Best setup to read in Japanese while looking up words

13 comments

1. Just install rikakun (chrome plugin) and read online pretty much anything?

2. When you read on iOS mobile, can’t you just highlight and tap the word, and a dictionary comes up?

3. Yomiwa

   https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yomiwa.yomiwa

4. 10ten reader for iOS,highlight > translate for translating entire sentences to test comprehension.

5. Yomitan – dictionary.

   Kindle reader app epubs – get epubs

   Calibre https://calibre-ebook.com/ – use this to get epubs from your kindle files

   https://ttu-ebook.web.app/ – read epubs here and use yomitan

   Google around a bit of you dont understand anything. There are better explanations out there.

6. (A) Jidoujisho. Has a reader with a built in tap-to-look-up dictionary. Also has word splitting for Japanese. You’ll have to import the yomichan dictionaries yourself, but those are easy to find on the yomichan website. You can also save dictionary entries to Anki with context from the book you saw it in.

   (B) KOreader. You can install this on your Kindle, but you may need to jailbreak it first, depending on your model. This has Japanese word-splitting support, so long-pressing will select the word and bring up the dictionary (you can quickly install the Japanese dictionaries in-app, unlike Jidoujisho). You can save words to an in-app vocabulary builder with spaced repetition. It isn’t fancy, but I’ve learned so much Japanese this way. There is also a plug in for sending Vocab to Anki, but it is kinda hard to set up.

   KOreader is my favorite. I used it on my Kobo. I started with Jidoujisho, but the reading experience just wasn’t as good. KOreader is a more natural reading experience that happens to have a lot of tools for learning Japanese. Jidoujisho often loses my progress, takes a long time to open books, cant take highlights, and yadda. KOreader does all that and more.

   Jidoujisho supports vertical text (tategaki), while KOreader doesn’t out of the box. However, there is a ‘patch’ file you can put in a specific folder to get vertical text in KOreader, and you can just use a rotated font for the same effect.

7. There’s an app on iOS called Satori Reader.

   It’s little Japanese stories, organized by levels. The great thing about it is that you can see the translations very easily, and it has people reading sentences if you want it.

   And all of it is very easy to use. Highly recommend it.

8. Immersion Reader on iOS, and ttsu reader on web. Immersion reader can help you look up and export decks to Anki as well. They’re both based on the same tool.

9. When i was also looking for something like this i quickly realized that there really isn’t something that would be good at everything but in the end even though i recommend it but at the same time i do NOT is LingQ. It’s paid and not cheap from my perspective.

   Pros (from the top of my head)

   * Browser and an app
   * With one click you get several definitions within a second and can through another click (if its a more obscure word, otherwise not needed) go to a different dictionary like [Jisho.org](http://Jisho.org) or even jp-jp dictionaries
   * Keeps track of your reading, known words and stuff like that with a day streak
   * It looks like you are already not a beginner but I went from hardly reading an easy article a day to reading an entire light novel a week in 4 months with knowing 600 kanji
   * It has furigana for unknown words but it’s not that good (wrong a lot of the times or not appearing at all)
   * You can highlight sentences and words to read it out loud and translate (just google tr., i dont use it) but you see the all the readings for a word with community meanings including the correct readings most of the times (the readings when you click on it are why i mainly use it since i don’t know most of the kanji yet )
   * Hundreds of imported content from the web like news, yt videos and much more and you can import whatever you want yourself
   * you can generate an AI audio of the whole book

   Cons

   * If you search it up on google you will see the problems with cancelling but from my perspective it’s just annoying since you have to click through like 3 pages to get to the cancel page
   * expensive
   * You have to convert the books from amazon DRM (Every readers needs this) and the worst part it doesnt handle furigana in the book so it literally just puts the furigana as the text and ruins the entire experience but you can fix this by removing the furigana from the book within a few minutes (just DM if you want the easy method)
   * Often it splits less common words so you have to select it OR now they introduced some kind of AI splitting and it actually works well

   In the end,

   Check the (you get 20 LingQs) free version for yourself to get an idea how it works. It has equal strengths and flaws but since i read on my phone and love seeing my progress (words read a day) and it motivates me to read more and sadly there aren’t alternatives i found to be better than this. I definitely forgot some stuff but this should should give you an idea of it. If you have anything to say or ask just comment and i will try to answer the best of my ability!

10. Satori Reader on iOS

11. 1)10ten Reader/YomiTan for PC browser look up. Restrict things to using web browser for best experience.

    2)10ten Reader for iOS (App)

    3)YouTube auto-generated subtitles (pause and use YomiTan or 10ten Reader on them). Find media with hard embdded subtitles and use YouTube auto-generated to compare and look up against (if match -> look up).

    4)PC Only — asbplayer (PC easiest setup) for anime/crunchyroll (drag and drop subtitles from https://jimaku.cc)

    5)PC Only — mangaocr/Cloe for quick keybind OCR. paste into jisho.org

    6)Textractor for VN games. Use YomiTan or 10ten

    8)iOS draw kanji on iOS keyboard and use yomiwa app for OCR.

12. I use Kanjitomo to read Japanese novels purchased on [amazon.co.jp](http://amazon.co.jp) via the Windows Kindle app.

    It is similar to Rikai-kun, with a mouse-over look-up interface, but it is OCR, so works with anything on your computer screen, including the Kindle app.

    Here’s a brief video I recorded for you that shows its strengths and weaknesses. As you will see, it can handle conjugated verbs fairly well.

    [https://youtu.be/kUJUEGP7Zek](https://youtu.be/kUJUEGP7Zek)

    One thing I like is how it gives you a variety of possible readings as well as a variety of definitions. It’s kind of quick on the video, but you’ll see on one spot I highlight the second definition of 使い込む (which is conjugated in the original text as 使い込んである) as I don’t think Banana Yoshimoto meant the first definition in this case.

    But as you will also see, given it is OCR, sometimes it just struggles with some kanji (e.g., for some reason it just doesn’t want to pick up 真っ黒). But, at the same time, because it’s OCR it does work with magazines, manga, screenshots, even photographs. Anything you can get on your computer, even outside your browser or kindle app.

    For someone who still needs an English translation, as well as for a learner, I haven’t found anything better yet, despite the age and often clunkiness of the app.

    As a leaner, I don’t want a full translation of the text. I just want to identify the one kanji or vocab word I don’t happen to know, all without interrupting the flow of my reading. And this app, despite all of its clunkiness and annoyances, does this reasonably well.

    EDIT: To whoever downvoted me, I’m 100% open to suggestions and criticisms. I freely admit this is an old way of doing things with its pros and cons, and I am always looking for a better way of doing things. However, as many Japanese books purchased on [amazon.co.jp](http://amazon.co.jp) aren’t available in the browser version of the Kindle cloud reader, we’re left with the Kindle PC app (or Rakuten’s Kobo) as the only means to easily obtain commercial Japanese books digitally, if we also want the mouse-over pop-up functionality I am looking for. This leaves us looking for OCR based solutions or having to go through the step of breaking the DRM, which has its own share of issues. It also doesn’t work with images, so isn’t applicable for manga or magazines.

13. I’m building this on iOS and macOS. Unfortunately no PC yet.

    Manabi Reader [https://reader.manabi.io](https://reader.manabi.io)

    It can read on the web or EPUB, including vertical texts. You can look up words by tapping on them. You can mine Anki flashcards (or Manabi flashcards).

    Unfortunately Amazon Kindle store is starting to encrypt things that you can’t decrypt. So the only option for more recently published ebooks on the Kindle store is Kindle itself.