Posted under General
As a self-study japanese weeaboo, I would like a little help in learning to become a proper translator.
Because I've finished all the Korean ones.
Sure, there's google translator and babel fish or not, but then again, who can trust them?
Especially if all of the difficult kanji is inside of the picture.
So what I'm asking is, what kind of program/dictionary do you use to help yourself translate the words?
(please direct me to a similar post to this in the forum if there is one.)
Updated
Rikaichan is nice. It's a Firefox plugin. http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/
If you don't know a particular kanji in a picture, you can try to look it up by radicals:
http://jisho.org/kanji/radicals/
http://tangorin.com/elements
Or you can also try handwritten recognition:
http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html
(I think a similar handwritten module may also be built into IME on windows. The handwritten recognition software I've come across tends to be picky about stroke order.)
To add to the multi-radical lookups:
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-bin/wwwjdic.cgi?1R
JDIC also has a number of subject specific dictionaries such as names, science, law, etc.
As mentioned, most handwriting recognition systems rely on stroke order. If you can write it in correct order you can likely look up the radical(s) anyway.
The hatena keyword lookup is useful for colloquialisms and cultural references.
http://d.hatena.ne.jp/keyword/
http://ext.dictionary.goo.ne.jp/
Or anything that isn't edict, really.
john1980 said:
Or you can also try handwritten recognition:
http://kanji.sljfaq.org/draw.html
(I think a similar handwritten module may also be built into IME on windows. The handwritten recognition software I've come across tends to be picky about stroke order.)
I normally do use the windows IME (and sometimes it involved redrawing over and over and hoping it recognises something as I can't actually draw kanji myself), but that looks handy.
For kanji, I use a hardcover copy of Halpern's New Japanese-English Character Dictionary. It gets some flak for using SKIP code and ignoring proper stroke order, but it's easier to look things up (and includes proper stroke order in the definition).
For online resources, I use JDIC (linked by seabook above) and Jeffrey's Japanese-English Dictionary server, which is here: http://linear.mv.com/cgi-bin/j-e/dict . Finally, Rikai-chan is great for non-picture text.
Zkanji http://zkanji.extra.hu/ is a pretty good application to help identify kanji, it allows for finer-grained and more powerful queries than most multi-radical kanji search engines.
If you go to http://ja.bab.la/, you can get free Japanese-English on-line dictionary. You can also take & create Japanese quizzes as well. It's pretty useful! check this out!
This is good site about understanding Japanese Slang: http://www.jslang.com/
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/completeguide.html
Learning Japanese grammar in a way that makes sense.
