The Emotional Pumpkin

感情的な南瓜

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Cool!

I was looking for a convenient Japanese-English dictionary to use on my PDA (trying to flip through a printed dictionary during class, with unknown words coming up every few minutes, is just too slow), and I found a great one here. It includes lookup by hiragana, katakana, and best of all, by kanji, which you can write in yourself and have the handwriting recognition algorithm do all the legwork. Looking up a word using the kanji without first having to look up the pronunciation of each symbol will cut my dictionary time in half!

UPDATE: Maybe not in half. You have to know the exact stroke count and order of each kanji for the recognition system to work right. This is fine most of the time, as you can guess with pretty good accuracy if you have learned the basics of writing kanji, but you have to write the characters carefully, and take care to lift the stylus between strokes so that the algorithm works properly. It's still a great resource, as you can get stroke count, stroke order, pronunciation and definition information on each symbol you look up.

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