Any tips for looking up words in books

8 comments

1. If you get a book on a kindle you can look it up by pressing the word. Alternately read online like syosetu where you can copy paste.

2. Three methods:

   1) You use Google Lens to translate the text, take the raw form of the text and look up the words in an online dictionary like jisho.org or goo辞書 (https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/)

   2) Look up by kanji radicals/components. If you go to jisho.org you’ll see a button labeled “radicals” if you take time to learn the radicals/components you can use a multi layered filter to find kanji. I can do this within 60 seconds since I’m so fast at it. After you source one kanji of the word you can do a wild card search. For example let’s say I’m looking for「大草原」So I start with looking up the middle kanji by components and I find it. I then search “？草？” (https://jisho.org/search/%EF%BC%9F%E8%8D%89%EF%BC%9F) which you can see the third result is the word I am looking for.

   3) Drawing, you can use drawing detection on iOS for JP keyboards, drawing detection is also on jisho.org in the button next to radicals. This is also a suitable option if your radical game is limited and really can’t find the kanji using it.

3. My workflow for reading a book where I need to look up a lot of words is:

   – Use camera to take picture of the page

   – Upload to Google Keep

   – Use Google Keep’s OCR to extract the text

   – Use Rikaichan or other browser extension dictionary to get the pronunciation/definition of each word

   If this sounds onerous, well, it kind of is. (I generally recommend that you read a book with fewer unknown words). But if the density of unknown words is high, it saves a little time and effort over looking up each word individually.

4. I think the paid for version of Yomiwa on Android has OCR lookups. Currently I’m using Google Lens and copying it into Yomiwa, but thinking of upgrading.

   If it takes you that long to look up a page though, you need to start reading easier books.

5. I use handwriting input on my phone (on Android you search for Japanese keyboard in settings and add the handwriting input). Then you can use any dictionary app or website.

   I can’t write more than a few characters from memory, but if you study the stroke order it’s easy to input one that you’re seeing. Even if you kind of fail, it will suggest a bunch of possibilities. It takes like 3 seconds to get a character once you practice a bit

6. for physical books I do this:

   1. Buy a metal book clip. Search Amazon for “metal book clips”. These keep the books open without marking, marring, or creasing your books. This is important because you will be looking up hundreds or thousands of words in the dictionary (either a computer dictionary or a physical one) and can’t hold your book open with your hand as you would normally. These are cheap and last forever.

   2. Buy “post it flags”. These are tiny post-it notes you put on the exact word you have, before you look away to the dictionary. You will be looking away thousands of times and you need an efficient way to turn back to the word.

   3. buy a magnifying glass. You will see tiny furigana and you will need it.

7. My first suggestion would be to read easier books. If there are so many unknown words that you need to Google translate a whole page then the material is not comprehensible. You should try manga before books, and kids books before adult books. You should check out https://bilingualmanga.org/ it has manga in both English and japanese and the text is selectable so it works well with Yomichan or Migaku.

   Edit to change link

8. Learn proper stroke order. Get this right and Google’s handwriting input will recognize it even if it’s really sloppy. Also, learn to guess phonetic components in kanji (e.g., the 義 in 儀 and 犠).