Comments on: Jim Breen on the iPhone

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 12:07:29 +0000

I'm kind of put off that iJisho claims you can use the Chinese handwriting input to enter kanji without mentioning that it doesn't work very well for a lot of kanji, and it doesn't work at all for many others, even some very common ones. If you buy the app expecting to be able to enter kanji by handwriting, you're going to be frustrated. Simply put, Chinese hanzi and Japanese kanji have been evolving separately for 1300+ years, so the characters aren't all the same anymore. Some kanji, even common ones, don't exist in Chinese, and others have a different stroke order (confounding the handwriting system if you enter the correct Japanese stroke order). It's a good thing to use, but you can't depend on it for finding kanji, because a frustratingly high percentage of the time, it just won't work.

For some of the common kanji that aren't in Chinese and more detail on why they're not, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character#…

Try entering the kanji for, e.g., common kanji like the ones for black, Buddha, and the “ki” in “genki” (and thousands of other words) on your iPhone.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:56:27 +0000

Sorry–click on my name to get to the page with the links to the app and the free dictionaries and instructions.

And, yup, Prof. Breen is indeed a cool guy.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 11:55:11 +0000

A much better version of Edict is the customized one at JLT. For Japanese to English it's the same as the standard, searchable by kanji or kana. But it's been heavily edited to be much better when searching English-to-Japanese. For example, with the standard Edict, when you look up “horse,” you get a lot of irrelevant results up front–”uma,” the actual word for horse, comes up only after scrolling through quite a few screens–it's around the 40th result. In the JLT version of Edict, it's the first. Plus there's a version of Jim Breen's Kanjidic and Enamdict on the JLT site–and Kanjidic has been altered to show you stroke orders for all 6355 kanji, and to let you look up kanji directly (by entering kanji), by reading, and by SKIP order. And there's a dictionary that shows you how to conjugate every verb in Edict (“what's the past causative of 'hasamu'?”), and to enter a conjugated verb to find out what tense and what verb it is. Plus you can add any dictionary in the standard EPWING format (Koujien, Daijirin, Kenkyusha, and a special version of Eijiro with yomigana added for every kanji compound, Genius, etc.). Morever, the app that runs all these dictionaries, EBPocket, doesn't have any of the problems you describe above–it works well. Visit the page below for links to the app ($4.99), to download the free dictionaries, and for instructions for replacing the version of Edict that comes with the app (which has the same E-to-J problems you mention above) with the free JLT dictionaries. Disclosure: I make the free dictionaries mentioned; I don't have anything to do with the app.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 05:07:29 +0000

For some of the common kanji that aren't in Chinese and more detail on why they're not, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character#…

Try entering the kanji for, e.g., common kanji like the ones for black, Buddha, and the “ki” in “genki” (and thousands of other words) on your iPhone.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:56:27 +0000

Sorry–click on my name to get to the page with the links to the app and the free dictionaries and instructions.

And, yup, Prof. Breen is indeed a cool guy.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:55:11 +0000