I wanted to share a discovery with the community. Google Lens has a translate ability… wait wait wait don’t berate me yet, it’s not what you think! So when you hold the translate tab of the Google Lens app over text, click the circle to snap the screen and save it, then scroll over to “Open In Translate”. Here you can copy/paste the text or portions of the text to store later or immediately create a card/note for in your SRS app of choice.
I recently started playing Persona 5 with full immersion, and this has helped me greatly enjoy the game while not burdening myself with having to try and find every single Kanji (no furigana). Just in the start screen I got a valuable sentence structure and new vocabulary words: ネットワークに接続していると、ゲーム内で様々な機能が利用できます。
This sentence took 10 seconds to snap, copy/paste, and store in my SRS. I’ve done this a lot now, and it only VERY OCCASSIONALLY misses a Kanji.
2 comments
That’s a nice system for creating sentence decks, thanks for sharing. I had the same reaction when I realised I could use the speech-to-text feature of the Japanese G-Board on my phone. So I was practicing pronunciation (if the phone understood me or not) while also “typing” faster.
Now if only you could integrate this into the desktop environment. I’ve used lens to pull common words from Destiny 2 and put them into a deck but it was a bit clunky.
Being able to Win+Shift+S to draw a box around a word on-screen and then quickly add it to a deck that can auto-pull the text from it and populate it with dictionary data (ala jpdb.io) would be great. EDIT: looking around, might be able to do this easily with Microsoft’s Translate app as there’s a tab for images. I’ll have to explore this later when I get home.