Adding Furigana to Your Kanji

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This is just a quick post mostly referencing an article over at NihonHacks (so you can just go over there and read about it too), about a couple cool tools to add furigana over your kanji (furigana = hiragana that’s on top of kanji to show you how to pronounce it).

There are two tools – one for adding furigana to OpenOffice documents (which is really useful since you can just copy and paste a bunch of Japanese into it, and then get the furigana), and another for Firefox.

Itadaki

“Itadaki is a Japanese language toolset for OpenOffice. It offers features intended for students and translators, including furigana (reading) annotation for Japanese text and an integrated dictionary.” [Source + download] I love OpenOffice (though I’m a Google Docs man, myself) as an alternative to Microsoft Office. I wouldn’t say it’s quite as good, but considering it’s free, it’s amazing. Either way, you should go take a look.

Furigana Inserter

Furigana Inserter is an add-on for the web browser Mozilla Firefox. It automatically inserts furigana for words written in kanji” [Source & Download]. Another alternative to this is Rikaichan, which is on my “Top Ten Free Resources for Learning Japanese” list.

All of you are so lucky you’re learning Japanese. I think it’s one of the most popular language (online), which means we get all sorts of special support, plugins, etc. I just use Rikaichan if I ever need any of these things, but if any of you end up using one of these, give me a shout and tell me how it goes!

  • http://mrklo-olstphn.livejournal.com/ stephen

    the dictionary for the furigana inserter is quite limited and sometimes gives wrong readings… but i guess that cannot be helped.

  • moshi_moshi

    i don't get it…?

  • Jomann

    doesnt even work unless the page has special html in it as far as i know.

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    Lol – so rikaichan sounds like the better option here. I still like the idea of the “Itadaki” program though.

  • Tohru

    Thanks for the update tofugu. I do like rikaichan a little better though. I remember it was one of your favorites too Koichi. I think Furigana has 2 downloads that help it work properly as well. (one for the hiragana in parentheses and the other is for the hiragana on top of the kanji.) The other download btw is XHTML Ruby Support 2.1.2008040101 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/…
    This is really helpful for me when I visit Japanese sites. Thanks tofugu! See you on edufire. ^_^

  • Alexis

    I use rikaichan, it is amazing! http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan#rcxdict

  • Monte Cristo

    The thing with furigana is that while it allows you to read a new word, in the long run it doesn't reinforce memorization. One becomes content with being able to read the kanji, then you see the same kanji in another document that doesn't have furigana and you realize you didn't really take the time to memorize it in the fist place. In that sense, I like Rikaichan better because you can read the kanji but since the reading doesn't stay there you have to make an effort to memorize it.

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    Totally agree

  • AaronL

    I second the notion on Rikaichan. These are interesting tools anyway– hopefully the problems others mentioned get solved at some point. -Aaron ispeakjapanese.net

  • http://erikagrace303.deviantart.com erika303

    Hmm.. why do we use は instead of わ? (assuming it says 'kore ha/wa nihongo desu')
    I noticed the end of konnichiwa is written with 'ha' instead of 'wa' too… :/ I'm confused ^^;

  • http://www.tofugu.com koichi

    You use は when it is a particle – a lot of people (myself included) write
    “wa” when writing in romaji, which makes it confusing. That’s why I don’t
    like romaji – too many different ways of doing it :) Best to just skip that
    and do hiragana instead.

  • http://erikagrace303.deviantart.com erika303

    Ohh ok. Thanks so much ^^ That was bugging me :P

  • http://erikagrace303.deviantart.com erika303

    Hmm.. why do we use は instead of わ? (assuming it says 'kore ha/wa nihongo desu')
    I noticed the end of konnichiwa is written with 'ha' instead of 'wa' too… :/ I'm confused ^^;

  • http://erikagrace303.deviantart.com erika303

    Ohh ok. Thanks so much ^^ That was bugging me :P

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  • http://hi.baidu.com/yishiym123 TwoBlue

    doesnt even work unless the page has special html in it as far as i know.

  • http://hi.baidu.com/yishiym123 TwoBlue

    doesnt even work unless the page has special html in it as far as i know.