Dictionary Overview

Using This Server

• What is Available
  The main attractions here are the Japanese/English English/Japanese word lists (i.e. dictionaries - words, names, legal terms, and life-science terms, etc.), and the database of kanji information. In addition, some might find value in the general descriptions of Japanese writing and encoding.

• How the Results are Returned
  You can potentially get a lot more out of this system if you understand the various ways how the Japanese text can be displayed. In particular, if you used a browser that groks raw Japanese, this server wouldn't need to send the text as images and things would be a wholehellofalot faster.

• Search Methods
  Read here for a description of how to specify what you're searching for. Learning to effectively indicate what you're looking for will help you get the most out of this system.

• Navigation
  There are smart warp-to buttons placed at the bottom of most pages. Generally, there will usually be one available to whisk you to an index of most concepts within the virtual world of this server.

• Customization
  You can customize both the dictionary server and the the kanji database server for your favorite selection of various parameters.

Etcetera

• Credits
  Credits for various aspects of this server. Also a brief discussion of some of the technology that's gone into some of the more interesting aspects of the server.

• Jeffrey's old Home Page
  Which also includes some things on learning Japanese.

• A note on kanji dictionaries for English speakers.

• Other Stuff

  • The definitive reference page for human languages is Tyler Chambers's iLoveLanguages Page, formerly known as the Human-Languages Page.

  • I hear that you can now buy the Canon Wordtank and other hard-to-find items in America.

  • The dictionary data that this server uses is available at Jim Breen's homepage. Lots of other resources are there for displaying and working with Japanese on PCs, Macs, and UNIX.

  • If you are on a PC and your browser doesn't support Japanese, or if you think it might if only you had the proper fonts, Microsoft has made a TrueType font available freely (and it will work with other browsers as well). Read the documentation and fetch the font as a self-extracting .exe file.

  • Japanese Input for Windows running IE4.0 or greater If you are using Windows and IE4.0 on an English version of Windows 95/NT4.0 (not only English, but any non-Japanese version, actually), you can now input Japanese text via the freely-available IME4.0. You can also get the full language pack for Japanese as well. For more recent Windows OS versions, there's more info about Microsft IME's.

  • Because of my support for ``graphical text,'' anyone with a graphical browser can use the full potential of this server, Japanese-support or not. As far as I know, this is the only site on the internet that provides this support explicitly.

  • Based upon some email exchanges with me back in 1992, Tad Perry wrote the very useful Quick and Dirty Guide to Japanese (a 32 k-byte text file). Should be very useful to the student of Japanese. Now, if I would spend my time reading it instead of playing with this server, my own Japanese would improve....

  • Ken Lunde has a new edition of UJIP, CJKV Information Processing, Second Edition.

  • Conversely, Harald Kucharek, (long, long ago) created some kana practice sheets available as either gzipped PostScript file (26 k-byte or a Acrobat file (201 k-byte.