Learn Japanese Today

Now doesn’t that look like the kind of guy you want to learn Japanese from? His name is Todd (like me) Rudick, and he is the developer of my favorite Japanese reading tool. Essentially, he started with the quandary of furigana, which, besides being the namesake of a dictionary I reviewed recently, are kana characters that show the reading of kanji in tiny lettering above them. Furigana are obviously helpful if you don’t know the kanji, but there is a tendency to only look at the furigana, rather than the kanji they represent, which is a significant roadblock. Rudick thought that if somehow you could make the furigana invisible, so you could only see it when you needed it, it would solve the problem, so he started out by creating things like this.

かん　じ
漢字

Try selecting the area of text where furigana would be, right on top of the kanji, and there it is! Your secret furigana. Obviously this would be a lot of work to keep doing on a large scale, and luckily for us, Todd Rudick became a software engineer and designed the Rikai.com reading tool. The premise behind the Rikai.com reading tool is that rather than having hidden furigana, the kana reading as well as the English definition pop up when you run your mouse over a kanji. It’s pretty cool, check it out here.

On to the review:

Ease of Use: 9

What I really like about the Rikai.com reading tool is how little you have to worry about getting the text in the right format. Everything goes into the reader as plain text, so, for example, you can copy and paste the list of links on the sidebar on a Japanese website without having to worry about dealing with the hyperlinks. You can also just enter in a web address, and it’ll open up the page and whenever you run your mouse over a Japanese word, you’ll get the reading and definition, which is really neat. The only problem is that sometimes, depending on how the site is coded, the information about the Japanese word gets blocked out by other material on the website, making it hard to read. When that happens, I recommend just copying and pasting stuff from the website. It’s quite easy.

Authenticity: 8

The definitions are accurate, but the reader can’t distinuish context, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. This is the main thing that separates a reading tool from a translator. This reader just gives you all the possible readings and definitions of a kanji compound, you have to figure out what context is being used on your own. On the one hand, you could get confused and learn the wrong reading by accident, but on the other, it forces you to really know what context is going on, and thereby learn Japanese better.

Quantity of Knowledge: 9

Not only do you get every reading and definition when you mouseover a kanji compund, you also get the individual meanings of each individual character, as well as other compounds that character is in. It’s a really cool feature that lets you really understand how kanji compounding works. I’m a big fan.

Price: 10

Oh yeah, it’s free.

Fun: 8

This tool makes reading FUN!!!! Obviously how much fun you have is going to be directly related to what you’re reading, but this not only lets you have fun feeling like you’re reading Japanese, but it also lets you surprise yourself at how well you can read without mousing over words. Achievement = Fun.

Overall: 9

I think this is a really good reading tool, not only for the information it offers you, but also for the information it doesn’t offer you. It will give you all sorts of information, but you have to do the brain work to figure out what the sentence is trying to say from all the components, which is great for learning how Japanese works. Give it a try.

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