Japanese version?

C

curwenx

秀才
Hi,

I seem to remember reading something about Japanese being added to PlecoDict in the future. Is this true? Any thoughts on what dictionaries might be available? The Kodansha Furigana Jap-Eng-Jap one would be excellent, and how about a Kanji dictionary? And of course, a real bonus for all of us that study both Chinese and Japanese would be a Jap-Chi-Jap dictionary.

Am I just dreaming?

PS: I've been playing around with my classmates' Japanese-Chinese standalone electronic dictionaries, and any recent model is absolutely top-notch when it comes to interface and functionality. I think looking at one of those would be a nice inspiration for future functionality in PlecoDict.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
I'm afraid we've pulled back on our Japanese plans after the extremely poor sales of our Berlitz Phrase Books product - in the aftermath of that, we've decided that we really should focus on our already-sucessful Chinese dictionary business and only very slowly branch out to other languages. Plus, between PADict et al there's a lot more competition in Japanese than there is in Chinese, much of it free and open-source.

It's possible we might release a Japanese product sometime in 2006, but it's really not a priority for us at this point.

And thanks for the tip about Japanese-Chinese standalone dictionaries; I've heard some good things about them but haven't gotten around to testing one out yet, but I'm planning a trip to Japan this summer and will certainly spend some time with one then.
 
C

curwenx

秀才
I'm using PAdict, and I'm quite impressed to have a freeware application with such a rich feature set. However, my biggest gripe is that I'm stuck with EDICT, which is fine but I'd change it for a good commercial dictionary any day. I also find the interface strange at times, and the handwriting has never to this day properly recognized a single character for me (PenPower generally accepts all my sloppy handwriting).

I guess I'll fork out for one of those standalone Japanese dictionaries I mentioned. There's even one with English-Chinese now:
http://cweb.canon.jp/wordtank/language/v80/index.html
I think this is the same as the Oxford dictionary in PlecoDict, which will of course never be a replacement for the ABC dictionary.
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
Japanese

Yes, I think as a product Pleco is spot-on. But as a former student at the Beijing Language & Culture Uni, it is very obvious that the majority of the students are Korean & Japanese. If you could include Japanese to the program it would be better than perfect.
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well actually, two things have happened since my previous posting that have made a Japanese dictionary less likely. We licensed a new handwriting recognizer which doesn't support Japanese (and which it would cost us an enormous amount of money to add Japanese characters to), and we made some unsuccessful inquiries with Japanese dictionary publishers - it appears that most of the good Japanese dictionary titles (Nelson et al) are already tied up in exclusive licenses. So there's not a whole lot we can do on the Japanese front.

Plus, to be honest I really don't think it's a growth market in the way that Chinese is - there's a huge boom in Chinese learning going on right now, wealthy parents in New York are actually hiring Chinese-speaking nannies in the hopes that their young children will pick up Chinese that way. And there's much more competition on the Japanese front, particularly for higher-level speakers; our software can handily beat the standalone electronic Chinese dictionaries from Besta et al, but we'd have a harder time going up against top-tier Japanese dictionaries like the Canon Wordtank V80. It's difficult to find products that are English-localized (the Wordtank is a rare exception on that front), but for advanced Japanese learners there really are a bunch of other options already out there. So I'm just not convinced that we'd make any money with a Japanese product.
 
J

Jim

榜眼
Mike, from the way I read Spambeano's post the suggestion is for a Chinese - Japanese (and/or Korean) - Chinese Plecodict. Certainly seems to be a large market and I don't recall seeing many Asian students sitting there with electronic dictionaries. I also didn't see them with a good selection of paper dictionaries either although they may exist. In the book stores the Chinese - all other languages dictiionaries selection is usually about the same size as the Chinese - English selection which means there is likely not too many to choose from so not sure what the licensing situation would be like. The word of mouth marketing with Asian students is probably pretty effective though. :)
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Well that's an interesting idea, but it's a little beyond our present abilities - we'd need people who could offer customer support in Japanese and Korean, and we don't have either of those right now. Something to think about as we expand, but not really possible at the moment unless we partnered with another company to do the localization and support. And the licenses would still be tricky, I believe Oxford offers Chinese-Korean and Chinese-Japanese titles but they're not really big enough to compete with the Japanese and Korean electronic dictionaries. Competition's still an issue, too, there are several nice-looking Japanese-Chinese and Korean-Chinese PDA titles available now not to mention all of those electronic dictionaries.
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
japanese - chinese

To respond to the last poster,
I live in tokyo (and am chinese) and there are a lot of japanese-chinese electronic dictionaries available. So I don't see any market possibilities for a pocket PC solution to an already overly saturated market. The problem though, is that most of those dictionaries here are geared towards japanese learners of chinese. (ie all the menus and interfaces are in japanese) Not english ones. Which is why I think plectoDict is a godsend.
 
R

rubito

Member
japanese dictionary

hi... it's been a while since this thread was going on... hopefully you're still watching it. i was wondering if anyone has any advice on purchasing a japanese electronic dictionary with handwriting recognition? a palm OS product would be fabulous, but stand-alone is also ok. i dont read enough japanese to be able to browse websites and read lists of features, so any direct URLS and such will be most appreciated! thanks!
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
There's a free Palm OS japanese dictionary here:

http://padict.sourceforge.net/

Even includes a handwriting recognizer, which while not as accurate as a commercially-developed one (like the Hanwang recognizer we use) does a reasonably good job as long as you get your stroke order correct.
 
R

rubito

Member
Thanks

Actually, after I posted the above, I found that and dowloaded it. Although the interface is quite a bit more complicated than Pleco, I've found it to be a pretty good dictionary. Considering the price, I think it's perfect!

Thanks for the answer...
 
H

hairyleprechaun

状元
Hello all,

I too am really interested in a Japanese dictionary for my PDA (though I am using a Pocket PC).

I am still hoping that Mike will eventually (hopefully sooner than later) liscense a good Japanese dictionary to use with PlecoDict, because PlecoDict still seems to be the best dicitionary engine, that includes handwriting recognition support, of every dictionary engine I have looked at so far. And, it is better by leaps and bounds . . . By the way Mike, conicidentally I have two roommates who, like me, are concurrently studying Chinese and Japanese, and of course, we are all waiting for your Japanese support . . .

Those of you who ended up buying or trying Japanese dictionaries, have you come across any that you like? Specifically, did anyone come across a decent Japanese dictionary that includes the ability to use a handwriting recognizer that is already installed on one's PDA (such as CE Star or Monster Chinese), or has its own built in handwriting recognizer, so that the user can look up Japanese kanji (characters) quickly, like in PlecoDict? I find it extremely frustrating to waste lots of time using the Japanese radical indexes to enter characters when I already know how to write them, thanks to studying Chinese.

If anyone has some suggestions of titles, please let me know the name of them, or just put the link to them in this thread.

Thank you very much for any feedback!

Darrol
 
mikelove

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
For Japanese handwriting we'd probably stick with Hanwang, they do offer a Kanji-friendly version of their recognizer and we've had such good luck with them so far that it seems silly to go anywhere else.

The fact that KALD has now been licensed to Casio doesn't really make things any better for us, though; much of the time when a big company like that throws in with a particular dictionary it's because they have an exclusive license for it. This is what kept us away from the Nelson one, for example.
 
G

GungHo

Member
For enabling Japanese handwriting recognition, suggest you take a look at the following:

http://www.firstloox.org/forums/showthread.php?s=8d8a2a67a5ebbeaf4c564bf024064139&t=4510&page=12

It doesn't seem to work for everybody though, so investigate carefully. 'Minor' bugs aside, it seems to work well on my ipaq (hx2490).

Then take a look at this thoroughly useful website:

http://www.japaneselanguagetools.com/PPC.html

Here you will find instructions on downloading EBpocket, which is a pretty decent dictionary reader. It's also free. You will also find a modified version of EDICT (and some rather useful Kanji/readings dictionaries). The modified version of EDICT has a much improved English-Japanese search function compared to previous versions.

Also on the site are instructions on how to obtain a usable conversion of Eijiro. Which is a stupendously large Eng-Jap dictionary (much larger than any other commercially available dictionary).
 
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