What is Reddit's opinion of KanjiTomo?

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This kind of ruins the point of having the actual books, but if you read raws on your computer you can use KanjiTomo which I've found immensely helpful. It's an on-screen Kanji reader, so you can just mouse over Kanji you don't know and get an instant translation.

I'm also about 8-9 months in my learning, very on and off, and with KanjiTomo and Google Translate I can translate a 38 page chapter of a manga in about an hour and a half and read it considerably faster (if you wanna see my translation, it's in my post history, I won't say the name b/c ecchi lol).

Anyways, if you don't want to read on your computer to start off, just have a dictionary handy and look up kanji you don't know. Oftentimes chapters will use the same kanji many times and before long you'll know them by repetition.

I recommend a program called kanjitomo. http://kanjitomo.net

It is a program that will OCR whatever is under your cursor and bring up a dictionary definition. It really speeds up reading manga but you need to have scans of a fairly good resolution for it to work well.

KanjiTomo isn't exactly what you're asking for, but I figured I'd mention it since it can handle translating windows apps that don't let you select text at all. It's sort of hard to use and crashes sometimes, though.

http://kanjitomo.net/ This! It's really powerful and works for images as well (and not only typed text.)

The only downside is that it's not as good at picking up conjugated verb forms and kana-only expressions as rikai is.

Kanjitomo is very helpful for the kind of thing you're trying to do. It's at its best when trying to read books in image form, but it can be used for games. It can start to suck really fast if the text boxes in the game have any kind of patterned background, or if the color combination is not great (black on white or white on black is best). There are also some characters that it will never properly detect even if they are in its dictionary.

Overall, it feels really tedious and painful to use if you're used to cozy browser reading with rikaichan & co. but it's a lot better than handwriting stuff into this thing, which is only useful when you know the stroke order. When it comes to VNs there's usually much better methods, though.

Actually, if you want good reading practice, I recommend using light novel ebooks with a Japanese OCR. The Honto ebook reader can be used overseas, and lets you adjust the font and font size. So you just make the font size and large, then run KanjiTomo alongside the ebook reader to help with kanji you don't know.

http://kanjitomo.net

And the nice thing is, the dialogue for most light novels is pretty simple. 6th grade reading level at most. And ebooks are pretty cheap.

Thanks for the tip. I don't use Google Translate too much, but it's always great to have another resource.

Btw, if you're interested. I've found that Kanjitomo seems to be pretty good. Best I've found so far, dictionary-wise. Really helps with the manga, heh.

Edit: Ah, that's it. I entered "意外にしまぱん" no wonder we got different results.

For reading unknown kanji, try using <u>kanjitomo</u>. It's not the easiest to use but it works pretty well for me.

If you want to translate manga though, try finding raws over on EXCNN. If you want I can try typeset/clean it for you.

> I basically can't read kanji. A lot of it is stuff I've never encountered. Today we read a short sentence about plant hormones. Sigh. I don't know a lot of the kanji and when I try to reproduce it on my tablet to look it up, my stroke order is wrong, and I can't figure out what it is sometimes. It just takes too long to find out what a word is. A lot of them are names, too.

Again, you won't have to reproduce these kanji to look them up if you use Kanjitomo.

Another option which is slightly less convenient in my opinion is to scan to pdf and then use Adobe Acrobat character recognition on the pdf. Some of it will be slightly wrong, but you'll be able to highlight words and copy-paste them into dictionaries.

If you use or have access to windows 7, then I would suggest downloading KanjiTomo. It makes looking up words you don't know super easy because it's like Rikai-kun for absolutely anything.

If your sources aren't digital, then go to your university's library and scan the pages into a pdf. Your library might even have people whose job is to scan shit for you, so check that out too.

Beyond that it's a little hard to give good advice, so here's just some regular old advice

I have no idea what kinds of sources you're using or allowed to use, but one thing you might want to try is finding a Japanese equivalent of "This Subject for Dummies". Something that's very introductory to help you get into whatever your working on.

You might want to try out certain skimming techniques on the actual sources or anything that's super long. One skimming technique is the one test prep companies tell you to use on the ACT: read the first and last sentence of each paragraph.

Another skimming technique is to kinda gloss over (basically skip) words or other things you don't know. You don't necessarily need to understand the whole source perfectly, and in fact you might not really need the whole source for your thesis. This is one thing I have difficulty with: I fell sorta compelled to READ ALL THE THINGS, but it might just make your life tons better if you can avoid falling prey to that.

Finally, TALK TO YOUR PROFESSOR/INSTRUCTOR. Unless your instructor is a 100% certified asshole, your instructor will be your ally in the battle to complete their class. Instructors don't want to have to give people bad grades, and some places evaluate instructors on how the students do in their classes, so the incentives and human emotional motivations all point toward helping you figure things out.

Good luck!

Direct translation of most JP sentences is really rough until you're pretty good at Japanese, even with a translator. Instead, I rely on knowing a few key words, or even a few key kanji in some cases, and assuming a lot of the rest of it.

That said, if you really need to find a kanji's meaning, http://kanjitomo.net/ is amazing. Especially if you're playing in an emulator, since it'll scan the screen where your mouse is at and tell you what's there.

The program is called KanjiTomo and I got it from this site. http://kanjitomo.net/

The program came with a .jar and a .bat file. When I click on the .jar I get the error from above. When I click on the .bat file nothing happens.

Since you're taking a class in Japanese (I presume since you typed the class title in Japanese), might I recomend instead to use Kanji Tomo to read/recognize any Kanji that you may not already know? This may be better for you overall than just asking someone else to translate individual sections.

Yotsubato is a common "first manga", but manga in general will have somewhat difficult grammar and vocab.

If you don't already know of it, try out KanjiTomo. It makes reading manga on your computer a lot easier, as it can detect and automatically look up kanji on your screen. Fair warning though, if you aren't already familiar with writing kanji and don't practice it a lot, using KanjiTomo too much can put you behind in terms of being able to write.