I have listed here linux software I deem useful to interact with the Japanese language.

For your system

  • the most important bit is to be able to input Japanese. I recommend fcitx5: See my home-manager config.
  • probably the most famous tool is anki. Beginners can start with the great kaishi deck. As I prefer to study in a terminal, I love clanki.
  • This Kanji font shows strike order.
  • sudachi: Japanese tokenizer: helps break a sentence into its components
  • jiten: a took to convert between kanji/romaji/kanas or to interrogate the dictionary, e.g.
jiten jmdict 新幹線
新幹線
しんかんせん
しꜛんかꜜんせん
[eng]
= Shinkansen | bullet train
--> noun (common) (futsuumeishi)

ミニ新幹線
ミニしんかんせん
[no pitch data]
[eng]
= mini-shinkansen
--> noun (common) (futsuumeishi)

or

jiten r2k toto
トト

  • ichiran: see https://ichi.moe/ for how it works. It's a lisp program that can be used via a docker image: docker exec -it ichiran-main-1 ichiran-cli -i "一覧は最高だぞ"

  • tagainjisho: a great dictionary with Qt interface, works really well for me, I just wish for a CLI.

For the browser

There are 2 competing plugins for firefox to do live translation of hovered words:

  • yomitan: successor of yomichan. Customizable but slower than next one
  • 10ten: "Rikaichamp" rename. Apparently more estethically pleasing and lightweight
  • mokuro: mokuro generates an archive from a scans of a manga, that can then be read in your browser with mokuro-reader. I discovered recently https://mokuro.moe/ that is probably not legal but quite convenient as a "work out of the box" solution.

for your editor

  • I mostly use neovim. I wanted to have a yomitan-like experience (popup with translation, pronunciation, radicals, tokenization) but could not find what I wanted so I ended up creating rikai.nvim. Let me know what you think !

Video

  • memento is an mpv GUI that like mpv can show 2 different subtitle track at the same time but it also lets you hover a word to see its translation, like yomitan does
  • [videOCR][videOCR-gh] extracts hardcoded subtitles from a video

Play games

  • the "Game gengo" youtuber made a video sorting Japanese games compatible with Japanese study. The end result is a spreadsheet listing the games with their difficulty, platform, Japanese level etc

  • but I was really interested in "Stein's gate" which was not part of the list. I then stumbled upon this video explaining how to hook the agent to be able to leverage yomitan while playing the game !

  • Textractor seems to be quite popular as well even though I haven't tried it yet

dictionaries