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:
🔖 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:
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:
🐛 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.
