Read Japanese A Useful Study Aid

A: The appropriately named "Read Japanese" (RJ), from US-based Basis Technology, can do this and more. RJ 1.1 solves three of the major problems that non-native speakers encounter when trying to read Japanese text: displaying kanji files, figuring out proper pronunciation, and looking up meanings.

First of all, RJ runs under English Windows 95/NT; no need for an add-on product such as KanjiKit or TwinBridge (although RJ enables only display, not input). So, even if you have a Japanese file that opens as nonsense characters in your English Web browser or word processor, you can cut and paste it into RJ to display the text properly as kanji. RJ supports S-JIS, EUC, and JIS text encodings.

The biggest advantage of RJ is that it does away with the time-consuming nuisance of looking up an unfamiliar kanji in a reference book. RJ offers single-click lookup of over 175,000 words and 6,300 characters.

In an RJ file, clicking on text with the left mouse button pops up the pronunciation and translated meaning of a hiragana or kanji combination (figure 1). Clicking with the right mouse button produces pronunciations and meanings for an individual character (figure 2). You can even elect to show nonstandard kanji readings used in personal and family names.

The pop-up window consists of a title bar, showing the kanji and the current "dictionary mode"; pronunciation bar (which, for individual kanji, lists all possible pronunciations, with on-yomi readings capitalized and kun-yomi readings in lowercase); translation bar; and auxiliary functions bar.

There are several selections in the auxiliary menu. Extended Info, for example, shows a variety of additional information about each character, including JIS and S-JIS encoding, the radical and stroke count, and - for those who still want to consult offline references - the Nelson Dictionary, Kenkyusha/Halpern,Spahn/Hadamitzky, and Henshall Guide numbers.

New in version 1.1 is a personalized Study List, in which you can save selected words and characters for future reference. The Search menu, meanwhile, offers several lookup choices, including "List all compounds with a given kanji" and "List all kanji/words with a given pronunciation" (figure 3).

Remember, though, that RJ is a kanji-reading aid, not an automatic translation system. While it automates the non-native's two slowest and most frustrating tasks in comprehending Japanese text - looking up kanji and finding dictionary meanings - you must have a basic familiarity with the syntax, structures, and idioms of the language to properly comprehend a Japanese document.

Read Japanese is a valuable and powerful study tool. Not only will it help beginning or intermediate students improve their facility with written Japanese, but it can assist even advanced speakers in deciphering unusual readings or uncommon characters.