But what a lot of people don’t know is that more often than not, these free dictionaries are labors of love. Very dedicated people build and maintain these dictionaries in their spare time, sacrificing a lot of time (and usually money) to keep them up and running.

I wanted to hear more about what it’s like to build and run one of these dictionaries, so I took some time to talk to Gregory Bober, the creator of one of my favorite Japanese dictionaries, Tangorin. We talked about Tangorin’s latest update, how Tangorin came about, where it’s going, and what’s wrong with Japanese dictionaries today.

Tell us a little about yourself — what’s your name, where are you from, etc..
My name is Grzegorz (Gregory) Bober. I’m 26 and I’m from Poland. I’m a web developer working mostly on personal projects.

How did you get interested in learning Japanese in the first place?
I’ve always been a huge film buff. In my early teens I got interested in anime. I discovered a whole different film universe and wanted to watch and understand everything in it.

I had a chance to learn English very early on so I got to enjoy movies on a whole new level. I never liked Polish cinema, there’s really not much to like, and once you get a taste of a really good American film, understand it without subtitles, and with cultural references, there’s no going back.

With anime, I was stuck with subtitles, and that bothered me a lot since I knew very well how much I was missing out. That’s why I started learning Japanese. Simply to watch anime without subtitles.

Did you teach yourself Japanese, or did you learn in a class?
Luckily there was a small foreign language school in my home town that offered a course in Japanese language, culture, and calligraphy. I went there during high school. Then I got accepted to the Japanology department at the University of Warsaw. It was a very intense course in everything related to Japan, with a strong focus on language. Knowing kana, basic kanji, basics of grammar and having watched a lot of anime helped me tremendously.

I was a pretty good student at first, but since I’m very lazy and get bored easily I got progressively bad. The fact that we started to spend too much time on classical Japanese and Buddhism didn’t help either. Learning Buddhist mantras by heart and deciphering Heian-jidai love letters from princes to every women in the imperial court while still not being able to have a proper conversation, seemed pointless, I lost interest and decided to drop out.

I never saw myself as a translator or a language teacher so there was no point in staying. I wrote my thesis about the influences of Western culture in the works of Shinichiro Watanabe (Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo), my professor liked it, but I never got my degree.

After so many years of studying, my Japanese still isn’t that great, but don’t worry, I don’t actually translate anything at Tangorin.

Have you ever traveled to or lived in Japan?
After I dropped out of university I spent a little over a year traveling, mostly in East and Southeast Asia. I stayed in Tokyo for six months. I lived in a long-term guest house in Nishi-Funabashi.

I’m not a huge fan of sightseeing, I prefer to stay in one place, live as local as possible and wait until I get to know my surroundings really well so that’s exactly what I did. I got out of Tokyo only once, to climb Mt. Fuji. Most of the time I spent with friends in Shibuya, Akihabara, Shinjuku, Harajuku, and Roppongi (in that order).

My Japanese was good enough to live there comfortably without any English. I had to leave because my two visas had run out and it’s not that easy to stay in Japan as a freelance developer without a degree. I definitely want to go back.

What is Tangorin? What does the name “Tangorin” mean?
Tangorin is essentially an online interface to various open projects built for Japanese language students. My job is to normalize data from several dictionary files, mostly from Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC, combine them into a single fast and easy-to-search database, and provide some basic additional features like custom vocabulary lists.

As for the name, I wanted something short and simple that sounded Japanese but was easy to pronounce and spell in Western languages. 単語 (tango) means “words,” 林 (rin) is a common suffix for dictionaries. I liked how it kind of sounded like tangerine. And that it was a very unpopular word on Google.

What new features are you adding to Tangorin?
The biggest change in the newest update will be a whole new interface based on Twitter Bootstrap. The main layout won’t change much but it will be more consistent and mobile friendly. Much faster too, performance- and bandwidth-wise. The most important thing is that it will help me make more updates on a more regular basis.

The wildcards functionality will be back (it was a terrible mistake to sacrifice them for database performance, sorry for that), few new features in Vocabulary, and improved search results sorting. Shortly after the update I will add a look-up method based on the Wikipedia API. It will translate article names into selected languages.

When did you decide to make Tangorin?
While studying at the university I realized there was no good online Japanese dictionary. There was of course WWWJDIC, Hideki (no longer exists), jisho.org, and few others, but apart from WWWJDIC they were all based on EDICT (and still are).

EDICT is basically a legacy database format for the newer much better structured JMdict. The main difference between these two formats is that a single entry in JMdict contains all the synonyms, alternative kanji writings and readings associated with the Japanese term it describes, whereas in EDICT they are divided into multiple reading-writing pairs with copied English definition.

I was also disappointed with the overall functionality of available dictionaries, how they weren’t properly linked together and lacked useful features like creating your own vocabulary lists. I made a simple interface for JMdict for personal use and then made it public under tangorin.com. Soon, most of my friends from Japanology started using it and they’ve been very helpful with its development.

What are your long-term goals for Tangorin?
First of all, to make it profitable. Right now running Tangorin costs me a lot of time and money. I really enjoy working on it and want to spend more time developing it. There’s a lot of room for improvement. Donations have been scarce but I don’t want to clutter the layout with more ads or limit Tangorin’s free functionality to offer features for a fee. I still need to figure this out. There’s a strong demand for a mobile app, especially on Android, so that’s definitely on my to do list.

Apart from that: autosuggest, incorporating Japanese WordNet to build a synonyms dictionary, hand-writing recognition, a simple morphological analyzer built with MeCab, kanji decomposition, a built-in spaced repetition system to effectively study words from Tangorin vocabulary lists, better forums, REST API, pronunciation, audio files.

I also plan on releasing a normalized, JSON version of all the WWWJDIC, Tatoeba, and KanjiVG data that Tangorin is based on.

How do you try to make Tangorin stand out?
By focusing on developing a clear, fast and easy to use search experience. By combining different look up methods so that you can search with Japanese, English, kana, romaji, kanji, and/or tags from a single input form.

So many Japanese dictionaries nowadays rely on Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC — do you think this is a good or a bad thing?
Definitely a bad thing. The fact that many dictionaries still use EDICT instead of JMdict makes it even worse. WWWJDIC is a fantastic project and the quality of its translations is pretty good. Any kind of alternative, especially for more experienced students, would be great.

We also need better example sentences.

I would love to license Kenkyusha’s database, both English-Japanese and Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, but I don’t have the resources to do that. Perhaps when Tangorin Android and iOS apps are finished.

Do you have any other projects you’re working on right now?
I have other small projects and ideas to work on but right now I’m focused only on Tangorin. It’s been five years since I started developing it and I feel like a lot more could be done in that time.

Thanks to Gregory Bober for the interview! You can check out Tangorin here.

Recently three new Japanese words made their way into the Oxford English Dictionary, officially blessing the English speaking world with concepts such as hikikomori, karoshi, and otaku. But, these aren’t the only words that have done this, just the most recent ones. There are actually a lot of Japanese words that we use as English words now – it’s not only the Japanese who get to turn someone else’s language into their own.

Japanese Words That English Speakers Use Pretty Commonly

I thought it would be fun to list out and define a bunch of the common Japanese words that have made it into the English language. There’s a lot of them, and I don’t think I’ve thought of all of them, so if you come up with any add them in the comments and I’ll try to update the list for future people reading this article (hello, if you’re from the future. How are the flying cars?).

Anime: Japanese cartoons / animation.

Banzai: A cheer. Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!

Bento: A meal served in a box with separations in it.

Bonsai: These are the little trees that are actually really old, but are really small because they’ve been trimmed and stunted by bonsai artists.

Dojo: A place for martial artists to practice.

Futon: A thin mattress of tufted cotton batting or similar material

Haiku: A type of poem that (in English) is typically 5-7-5 syllables.

Hancho: Squad leader. The person in charge… i.e. the “Head Hancho.”

Hara-kiri: Suicide by disembowelment.

Hikikomori: The abnormal avoidance of social contact, especially by adolescent males.*

Jujitsu: A soft-style type of Japanese martial art.

Kamikaze: Literally means “divine wind” but in English it’s known to refer to a suicide attack (usually by airplane).

Karaoke: A machine that plays a song for you and has you sing along, usually with a bunch of people and a bunch of sake.

Karate: A hard-style type of Japanese martial art.

Karoshi: Death from overwork*

Kimono: Traditional Japanese clothing.

Koan: A paradox that Buddhist monks meditate on.

Manga: Japanese comics.

Miso: Made mostly from soybeans, this paste is in all kinds of foods, the most common being “miso soup.”

Ninja: The guys that wear black, sneak around, and assassinate people. These guys are sneaky.

Origami: The art of folding paper into different shapes, figures, etc.

Otaku: Huge fanboy of something, like anime, gundam models, or Tofugu (I know you’re all Tofugu otaku, right?)*

Ramen: Japanese noodle soupy dish.

Sake: Rice wine.

Samurai: A warrior from feudal Japan. If you want to talk like a samurai, that’s different.

Sashimi: Raw fish, sliced into pieces (not to be confused with sushi).

Seppuku: Another word for disemboweling yourself.

Sudoku: The number placement puzzle that’s popular in a lot of newspapers and other places.

Sumo: This is the sport where two big guys try to knock each other down. i.e. “Sumo Wrestling.”

Sushi: a small bit of cold rice with something on top or inside it. C’mon, you know what sushi is.

Tsunami: Huge waves!

Tycoon: Someone who’s a powerful business person (original Japanese word, 大君 (taikun) means liege lord or shogunate, so it’s evolved in its English meaning).

Typhoon: A violent tropical storm or cyclone (probably originally a Chinese word, though).

Wasabi: Similar to horseradish. This is a green paste that’s nice and spicy, and often used with sushi.

Yakuza: Japanese mafia.

Zen: A sect of Buddhism in Japan.

*These three were just added to the official English Dictionary list!

Oh, and if you aren’t bored already (or are bored), here’s a video talking about the three new words that were just added: hikikomori, otaku, and karoshi. Enjoy!

[yframe url='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wMkAIvL_Ass']

So what else would you add to this list? Any other Japanese words you hear quite a bit that are used pretty easily in English? My favorite by far is hancho. I thought that was Spanish, or something.

The dictionary is the little wwwJDic icon, and yes, huge M’s fan!

Looking up Japanese Vocab

The first thing I did was look up words, English -> Japanese. I found that it wasn’t always perfect, but neither is the original Jim Breen dictionary, for that matter. Sometimes, the web version requires you to scroll through lists and lists of results. Although it is sometimes difficult to find the vocabulary word you were originally searching for, Jim Breen’s depth of search results are handy when you’re looking for something out of the ordinary.

Back to the iPhone version!

The iPhone version is quite a bit worse than the real version. The iPhone version will only allow you to see the first page of results when the vocab word you’re looking for can sometimes be on page two or three. For example, when I searched for telephone, it wouldn’t come up with 電話 (でんわ). Instead, it came up with things like telephone box, push pin telephone, etc. The results for telephone were probably on pages two or three, but since those results aren’t included in the iPhone version, there was no way to find the right translation. There were situations like this where it was obvious it didn’t quite work right, so at least you won’t be tricked into thinking a translation is something it’s not.

Here’s one that did work. I searched for the word Monkey, and it came up with these results:

I turned “Common Words Only,” since this normally helps the real version of this dictionary come up with more usable search results.

First result was correct! Sadly, the results aren’t always the best possible results. That’s something that hopefully they will work on for the future of this app.

Translating Kanji into English

Here’s another feature I was excited about. Since the iPhone can now type in Japanese, being able to look up kanji would be wonderful. Unfortunately, at this time (August 6, 2008), the app just crashes whenever you try to look something up. I hope they fix this feature soon.

Overall Impressions

I wasn’t entirely impressed with this application. It has a lot of potential for being a great Japanese dictionary for the iPhone, but it just doesn’t work consistantly enough (right now). I think it will get better, so it’s worth checking out after they fix some of the bugs. There’s another Japanese dictionary on the iTunes App store, iJisho, but that ones way way worse, plus it costs money. The wwwJDic application is free, and you can’t beat  that, especially when it beats the current competition (which isn’t all that great either).

Even though this application is buggy, and it doesn’t always come up with good search results, it’s still the best thing available, so if you’re looking for a Japanese dictionary for your iPhone, this is your best bet.

Other News: Don’t forget about our Twitter Contest, where you can win the tastiest Japanese candy in the whole world known and unknown plus the universe too.