nihonhacks.com » Japanese Computer

Furigana extension for Open Office

thomas — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 13:52:36 +0000

A reader named Ben sent in this tip about adding Furigana to documents in Open Office:

I’ve been looking at your site and thought I’d send you this tip.

For those whose kanji reading ability is still low, or for those who are willing to admit that they can’t read them all, there is an Open Office extension that is very useful – all for free. To use this hack, the free Open Office software needs to be downloaded and installed. The extension is called Itadaki (a quick search will bring you to the extension project page). After installing Itadaki as well as the accompanying dictionary file, you can load a document in Japanese and have Itadaki add readings to every character in the document. Some of them will need to be corrected, but Japanese people will be impressed with your kanji ability, even if you give the wrong reading. Hope it is useful!

I did the search for you. Here’s a direct link to the extension project page: Itadaki Furigana

Thanks Ben!

Do you know of any good software extensions/plug-ins to help with Japanese on the computer? If so, send them in!

Read the Japanese web with Rikaichan

thomas — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:25:28 +0000

Here’s a great tip for reading Japanese websites, courtesy of Ryan Coffey and Move To Nanaimo. It’s about a Firefox plug-in called Rikaichan. If you use Firefox (I do), and you study Japanese (I do), then you should definately have this plug-in installed (I do). In Ryan’s words:

Hi Thomas, (and everyone)

I think I have a hack that would be of great use to anyone living in Japan. Having spent four years there myself (that’s right, I had to leave in order to preserve my sanity) I can apreciate how hard it often is to do simple things due to cultural and linguistic differences. Well, this hack is in the linguistic category. I have found a plugin for my browser that allows me to handle kanji and new words in general, at least while online.

The plugin in question is called “Rikaichan“. I have it for firefox in both my mac and my pc. I’m not sure if it’s available for explorer and honestly I don’t care because I find explorer to be about as efficient and productive as an Eikaiwa Manager’s meeting.

Once you’ve installed Rikaichan, you’ll need to decide what language you want to use. You can have Japanese and English, Japanese and German, Japanese and French or Japanese and Russian. You’ll need to download and install the dictionary before you can use it. There is a dictionary for recognizing names as well. I suppose this is so someone named “Tanaka-San” doesn’t come up as “Rice Paddy Middle-San”. Which though a little amusing, doesn’t help us know how to address people!

Using Rikaichan is really easy. All you have to do is go to your tools menu and click on Rikaichan and then go to a Japanese site and run your mouse over some Japanese that you need help reading. It’s smart enough to recognize that certain groupings of kanji signify one word rather than a couple. It’s not perfect at this, but it does a much better job than I can!

Granted, due to the grammatical differences and what I would describe as a different “headspace” or “world view” inherent between English and Japanese, the more Japanese you already speak, the more complete your understanding of the written Japanese will be. Having said that, even if you’re still struggling trying to understand what station the place you’re trying to go to is at, or what the name of a certain store or organiation is, this plugin can help you a great deal.

Good luck!

Rikaichan is awesome and I often use it for reading random Japanese wikipedia articles (a great way to practice reading, btw). It’s really easy to use, and pops up definitions on mouse-over. Way faster than using a paper dictionary or even a denshi-jisho.

In case you missed the links above, you can get Rikaichan at the official site or from its Firefox add-ons page.

Check it out! Thanks Ryan!

Do you know any cool Japanese add-ons/plug-ins? If so, let me know in the comments or drop a mail to the address in the sidebar!

Typing Your Japanese Address: The Easy Way

thomas — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 12:43:35 +0000

Ken Y-N of superblog WhatJapanThinks sent this tip in back in January (!), but for some reason it slipped past my radar. Often when you order something or sign up for something online you have to type in your address. This takes some time, especially if your address has some rare/difficult kanjis in it. There’s a much easier way and here it is:

And a bonus tip – go into the IME config dialog – right click the toolbar, choose Settings/設定, Properties/プロパティ, Dictionary/辞書・学習 and from the list box click on 郵便番号辞書. Now if you type in your post code (with a hyphen, and don’t use the numeric keypad) and hit space, it will convert to the address.

It’s really that easy. Just type in your postal code:

And press spacebar:

(note: this isn’t my real postal code. I took it off some junk-mail that was lying on my desk).

My computer came with this option on by default, so you might not even have to go into your IME config dialog.

Thanks Ken!

More Japanese keyboard fun:

Japanese IME Kanji Selection Hotkeys

thomas — Tue, 20 May 2008 09:18:56 +0000

Here are a few quick tips for the Japanese keyboard. Let’s say you want to type in a kanji. To do that, you type in the hirgana reading and press space. As a result of all your hard work, you get a list of kanji like this:

If your kanji is on the list, you’re done! You can just press the corresponding number or arrow down to the correct choice.

But what if your kanji isn’t on that list?

If you want to avoid hitting the down arrow a million times, you can press SHIFT-DOWN (or PageDown) and it will scroll down to the next set of ten choices. Page through until you find your kanji.

Even better, you can click that little double-arrow button to open up all possible choices in a table. Once open, you can select your kanji by clicking it, or using a combination of right-arrows and numbers.

Even better than that, instead of clicking you can press TAB to open up the table.

These tips are useful for typing names/words that you don’t know how to read as a compound, but know how to read as individual kanjis. It’s also useful for rare or made-up words that the Japanese IME just doesn’t recognize. The other day, my wife was searching amazon.co.jp for a novel called 錦繍 (kinshuu).　　Typing きんしゅう in the Japanese IME didn’t produce the compound needed, so she had to type each kanji in individually. Using these hotkeys speeds up the process.

For more Japanese IME shortcuts, check my earlier article about the Magic Katakana Hotkey

F7: The Magic Katakana Key

thomas — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 22:28:09 +0000

This is a quick tip for the Japanese keyboard. When typing in katakana words, sometimes the computer tries to give you kanji after you hit the space bar. Look what happens when I try to type in “Lisa Simpson”

Oh no! I didn’t want all those kanji. What I really wanted was katakana. There’s an easy way to get katakana: press F7 instead of space bar:

Mission Accomplished. F7, you see, is the katakana hotkey. Just type in the characters you want katakanized, hit F7 and you are ready to go. Much faster than using a series of shift-rightarrows. And your Japanese input system should remember it for next time.

If you make a mistake and want to get back to hiragana, then use F6.

Other similar, but less useful, hotkeys are F8 for half-size katakana and F9/F10 for unsatisfactory romanization.

Do you have any Japanese keyboard tips? Let me know in the comments.