We’re excited to announce that the “Search Kanji by Drawing” feature has officially graduated from beta!

Since we first launched this feature back in April 2022, we’ve been continuously improving the recognition accuracy and expanding the range of kanji that can be detected. Today, we’re happy to share that the drawing search now recognizes
2,206 different kanji characters – making it even more useful for your Japanese learning journey.

🆕 Newly supported kanji

In this latest update, we’ve added support for 85 additional kanji characters that weren’t previously recognized. These include common names, place names, and characters you might encounter in everyday Japanese:

吾 朋 昌 旭 亘 只 頁 肌 勺 汐 砂 填 圭 鯉 林 桂 柏 梢 杏 桐 沫 荻 王 銑 辻 敬 幌 嬌 匕 蝶 独 進 曰 描 掲 乃 允 裳 敢 徳 街 数 笠 笹 篭 匁 勿 伊 漕 散 廿 之 智 弘 猪 渚 阿 窪 苑 酉 梓 摯 菱 亥 椿 錘 栗 楠 枢 彦 亜 蒲 航 瓜 函 脹 烏 蔦 鳩 薦 寅 辰 丑 卯 巳

This expansion means you can now draw kanji from Japanese names like 桂 (Katsura), 梓 (Azusa), and 楠 (Kusunoki), or look up characters you encounter in place names and classical texts.

🖌️ Try it out!

The kanji drawing search is available right from the https://www.japandict.com/. Just click on the brush icon next to the search box and start drawing!

We hope this improvement makes JapanDict even more helpful for your Japanese studies. If you have any feedback or encounter any issues, please let us know in the https://forum.japandict.com/.

ありがとうございます！ 📚

Image by freepik

It’s been a while since our last update, but instead of doing summer vacations, we’ve been very busy working on some new features and improvements in japandict.com! We hope you like them.

🖌️ Kanji user lists

Since we added the user lists feature, many people requested the possibility to add kanji. Although this feature was planned since the beginning, it was not ready when we launched it.

We’ve been working hard to deliver this feature as soon as possible, and we’re very happy to present it now! When you create a new user list, it’s now possible to add both words and kanji in the same list.

🗣️ Collocations and expressions

Collocations are words that are normally used together and sound natural to a native speaker. For example, if you want to say “to have a bath”, the natural expression would be お風呂に入る.

Selected words now have a new section called “Collocations and expressions” which contain a list of collocations and expressions using that word. We believe that this could be a very useful tool to learn how to sound more natural to native speakers.

Some examples:

• お風呂
• 耳
• 友達
• だ

🔖 New categories and tags

JMDict, the parent project where JapanDict takes most of it’s content, has added some new categories to classify words. As usual, we’ve also implemented these changes and are now ready to be used.

Some of the new categories:

• Cards – Terms used in card games such as poker, etc.
• Kabuki – Terms used in kabuki, a classical form of Japanese drama.
• Greek mythology – Words used in the ancient Greek mythology.
• and more…

Also, some categories have been renamed:

• The “obscure” category (#obs tag) has been renamed to #rare and all the words have been migrated there.
• Language tags have new names to avoid clashes with other tags from different categories. From now on, they will have the suffix “_lang” added to them. For example: #eng will be #eng_lang.

🧑‍🎓 New JLPT word lists

Some inaccuracies in the JLPT vocabulary lists were reported in the forum, and after some investigation we realized that the algorithm that is inserting this data into the system, was not able to detect the proper words correctly. After some manual tuning, we’ve finally fixed these flaws and now the lists are better than ever! Check them out:

• Japanese JLPT Level N5 vocabulary
• Japanese JLPT Level N4 vocabulary
• Japanese JLPT Level N3 vocabulary
• Japanese JLPT Level N2 vocabulary
• Japanese JLPT Level N1 vocabulary

🐛 Other small improvements and bugfixes

As usual, we also have a big list of small changes and improvements that were done since our last update:

• Improvement: Dark mode doesn’t show a “white flash” any more when switching pages.
• Improvement: Lists of user lists are now paginated.
• Improvement: Database optimizations to make the site faster and more responsive.
• Improvement: Implemented search only forms in kanji and readings.
• Improvement: Added some antispam measures in the JapanDict forum.
• Improvement: Added “gloss type” from JMDict in some glosses. Example: のぞみ
• Cosmetic: Small improvements in dark mode theme.
• Bugfix: auto-redirect in kanji can now be disabled.
• Bugfix: user registration was crashing when username had kanji or kana characters. It’s now showing a warning that these characters cannot be used.
• Bugfix: Usernames that contained a dot or that were shorter than 3 characters were failing in the forum.
• Bugfix: “order by” in lists of user created lists was not working properly.
• Bugfix: Showing the “not found” page instead of an error when a user list doesn’t exist.

Discuss in the forum

Image by JapanDict, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Since our last update, we’ve been working hard to implement one of the features that we had in mind almost since the beginning. It’s a big update and this was one of the reasons why we implemented user accounts very recently.

We are very excited to introduce the new user lists.

👤 User lists

Have you ever wanted to keep a list of the vocabulary words that you are learning? Maybe you wanted to keep track of funny or interesting words and share it with the world? Now you can create your own lists, add words and keep them private or public to share them with the rest of our users.

📄 Lists and tags rework

When implementing user lists, we took the opportunity to also revamp our lists and tags section. We have separated the lists in several categories and now the lists are better organized and are much easier to navigate.

🧭 Breadcrumbs

With all the new sections and features that we’ve added recently it’s becoming easier to get lost on the website. To avoid that we’ve added breadcrumbs in most pages to indicate the current page’s location within the navigation tree.

🤏 Other small improvements

Other fixes and improvements that are not big enough to have its own category:

• When clicking a word that has multiple different meanings, it will go directly to the actual meaning.
• Added an option in preferences to disable automatic redirection when there is only one result in search. This was a request from one of our users in the forum.
• Fixes in pagination when changing between words and kanji. Another request in the forum.
• Fixes in the example sentences as discussed in the forum.
• Fixes in some verbs conjugations as discussed in the forum.
• Small visual improvements in dark mode.
• Fixed pagination in small screens, being too big when there were a lot of pages.

🙏 Thank you! ありがとう！

Thank you for all the suggestions and feedback done in the JapanDict forum. It helped us to fix some issues that were very difficult to detect. Please keep sending us your suggestions so we can improve the dictionary!

Discuss in the forum

Image by Storyset

After the last update, we received a lot of suggestions and positive feedback. We want to say a sincere ありがとう to all of you! We really appreciate all your messages!

Since then, we continued working on fixing some bugs and implementing some features that we believe that can be very interesting. We hope you enjoy them!

✍️ Search kanji by drawing

One of the most requested features is finally here. Use the new “search by drawing” functionality to look for a specific kanji character by drawing it with your mouse or with your finger.

Our recognition algorithm is capable to find any kanji instantly, even if the stroke order is not the right one. Give it a try!

This feature is still in beta testing. Please share your impression in the forum, so we can improve it.

🔊 Pronunciation voice improvements

As you may already know, the pronunciation voice in all the words and sentences is computer generated, and even though it has great quality, sometimes it can sound a bit “artificial”.

From now on, the generated voice is using “Neural text-to-speech” technology, that can produce even higher quality voices than before. By using machine learning technologies,  the voices generated using neural TTS sound more natural and human than the other regular voices.

Another change is that the voice is now emulating a male speaker instead of a female one. However, if you prefer the “regular” synthesized female voice, you can configure your account to use it. Just go to settings and select it.

📰 The Latest news in home page

While we will still post the latest news to our regular channels (blog, Telegram, Twitter and Facebook), we will also show them in the dictionary home page. We believe it’s a good way to keep all the people who don’t use our social media accounts up to date with the changes made into the dictionary.

🦜 Pitch accent info

When a word has pitch accent reading information, a new button will appear, with more details about it. This feature was suggested in the forum, and we think it is a fantastic idea that will make it easier for students to remember each pattern.

Other small improvements

Last but not least, some other small improvements made to the website:

• “Remember me” is checked by default on the login page.
• Added an information box with some tips in the search kanji page.
• Replaced the feedback form with information about how to provide feedback.
• Kanji stroke order images will only be shown if they exist.

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Discuss in the forum

Image by Ayu Nabila, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons