It’s been a while since our last update, but we’ve been working hard with small improvements, bug-fixing and adding a new feature that we believe will make happy a lot of people whose native language is not English.

We’re very excited to introduce the addition of new languages for the search, translations, kanji and the example sentences.

New languages in translations

Besides English, translations will also be available in Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish for selected words. These translations are directly taken from the great JMDict Project (also where most of the information in JapanDict comes from) and include:

• 336,000 entries in German from the WaDokuJT Japanese-German dictionary file compiled by Ulrich Apel.
• 121,000 entries in Russian from the Warodai project.
• 51,000 entries in Hungarian compiled by Istvan Varga using some advanced NLP techniques.
• 41,000 entries in Spanish from a combination of two dictionaries: the HISPADIC Japanese-Spanish dictionary and the RUI Japanese-Spanish dictionary compiled by Francisco Barberan.
• 29,000 entries in Dutch from the Waran Jiten project wiki at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium.
• 16,000 entries in Swedish using automation techniques to translate entries from English. The resulting translations have also been manually modified to improve quality.
• 15,600 entries in French from two different sources: the Japanese-French dictionary file from the Dictionnaire français-japonais project by Jean-Marc Desperrier and the French translations in the JMdict Internationalization project.
• 10,000 entries in Slovenian from the JASLOV dictionary file.

More information about these translations can be found in the WWWJDIC documentation.

Kanji meanings in more languages

The kanji dictionary also includes new languages coming from the KANJIDIC project. In this case, besides English, meanings in French, Spanish and Portuguese are also included.

Multiple languages in example sentences

Last but not least, the example sentences will also have translations in other languages. These are coming from the collaborative Tatoeba project and the following extra languages are now supported: Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Portuguese.

Because of the collaborative nature of the Tatoeba project, anyone can add new translations or improve the current ones. To encourage collaboration a direct link to the Tatoeba sentence will be provided for every example.

Search in different languages

Multi-language has also been added to the search. By default, all searches will be done in English and Japanese, but it’s now possible to select other languages by clicking in the “Advanced” link.

Please try these new features and let us know what you think!

Do you know how to properly pronounce a Japanese word? To help you learn how to speak Japanese, we have implemented a new feature in JapanDict: audio pronunciation for all the words and sentences in the dictionary.

We already had in the past pronunciation for some popular words, but we have to admit it wasn’t really good. For example, it didn’t cover all the words in the dictionary and the voice was very “robotic“. Now, and thanks to our Japanese robot friend Mizuki (yes, she is a robot), every word and sentence in the dictionary will have the ability to be listened. Just click on the speaker () icon next to the word and it will be played in perfect Japanese. Although the voice is still computer generated, the quality of the speech is way better. It looks almost human!

Examples of some things that can be heard:

• Every possible way to pronounce a word
• Every possible declension of any verb or adjective
• Every example sentence for any word

Try it now!

 

Some examples:

Today is a very special day. Six years ago we launched for the first time the JapanDict Japanese dictionary. Happy birthday JapanDict! Since our first launch, a lot of things have changed. We’ve redesigned the dictionary a couple of times, adding more and more useful features over the time but keeping the simple, fast and easy to use interface that made us popular.

 

To celebrate our birthday, we are adding more features to JapanDict. The most important one is something we wanted to have in the JapanDict Japanese dictionary for so long: the multi radical kanji search.

Multi radical kanji search

Imagine you see a kanji character on a newspaper, tv or any other place where you can’t just “copy-paste” it into the dictionary. What could you do? Now, with a little bit of analysis it’s possible to look for a specific kanji in JapanDict without knowing how to write it in your computer.

Using the multi radical kanji search is now possible to find any kanji by selecting the radicals (or components) forming it. With a little bit of practice it’s very easy to use it.

Other improvements

Although the multi radical kanji search is the biggest improvement, we’ve also worked on other important features and fixes to the dictionary. Some of them are:

• New tabbed interface to select between different kind of searches
• Improved quick search feature with word search and kanji search
• Improved kanji search
• Some design changes and improvements
• Some bugs fixed

Go to JapanDict.com to see all the improvements and let us know what you think!