Japanese Lessons #5: [Software] - Zkanji

 
Konnichiwa Minna-san!

It’s been a while since I last posted a Japanese lesson. Today, I’m also not going to write any Japanese lesson but don’t feel bad.

I’m going to introduce a software that I believe is a must-have for those who are studying the Japanese language. It is called Zkanji. Don’t fuss, it isn’t all about kanji. It’s an English-Japanese-English dictionary. Not only that, it also have a Kanji writing recognition feature, sample sentences and study mode feature.

Wow, this article has been pending for like 30 minutes because I was trying to figure out how to make zapgrab work in Vista. Haha.

Anyways, let’s continue.

Here’s how Zkanji would look like when you open it.

Looks a bit scary because of the Kanji, eh?

Once you minimize zkanji, you could right-click the icon and choose Japanese-English dictionary for the pop up dictionary. Here’s how it looks like.

What makes it different from other dictionaries? Zkanji could recognize inflections of japanese verbs and adjectives (okay, i might be missing some things but you could ask if you have questions). What do i mean by this? Here’s an example.

Let’s have taberu (to eat)  for example. If you type in taberu 「たべる、食べる」, most dictionaries will give you a definition of “to eat”. And oh, by the way, you can type in using roomaji in zkanji. It will automatically convert it to hiragana.

But, if you try to search for the inflection of the word taberu like tabetai (want to eat), tabeteiru (eating), other dictionaries would just give you an error message that it could not be found. In zkanji, it’s different. It will tell you that it is an inflection of a certain word.

It’s pretty amazing, really. You could try it out with adjectives as well.

Just a quick preview of zkanji’s kanji writing recognition.

Let’s say you don’t know a certain kanji written in a paper, toy or gadget. You could use zkanji for that! Just click the icon for handwriting recognition and it’ll open up a small box where you would write the unknown Kanji.

Now you could write the Kanji!

Sorry, my handwriting is not that good haha. There it goes, it will show you a list of kanji and if you write it just right, then it’ll show as the first one. Then you could click on the kanji and voila! it will appear in the dictionary.

You can read more and download zkanji here. And right now, it is only available for windows user. No version for Mac yet.

If you have any problems with zkanji, feel free to ask and I would be glad to assist you. If I couldn’t answer your questions, don’t worry! The person who made zkanji is my friend. Lucky ^^

Have a good day everyone and happy learning.

Mata ne!

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