Japanese Input and Dictionaries?

M

Matadon

Registered
I've been studying Japanese for about two-ish years now, and regularly chat with friends (as well as my girlfriend) online in Japanese. As I'm a native English speaker, this isn't always easy, so under Linux, I've made heavy use of a little terminal-based program called 'xjdic' to look up kanji that I didn't know; it backends on the Jim Breem dictionary, and is overall quite usable, albeit lacking a great deal of searching intelligence.

Now, I'm using OS X. Is there anything for the Mac like xjdic? I've googled around a bit and not found much, other than a small pile of apps geared towards very basic students of Japanese -- I don't really need romaji or a kana-only dictionary. I could probably hack xjdic to run on OS X, as it's a very simple program, but I'd have to run both Terminal.app *and* GLTerm (GLTerm doesn't support Japanese characters), and I'd rather just have a simple GUI app.

So, any tips?

The other question is likely more simple -- when inputting in hiragana, is there a quick key to convert whatever it is I just typed into katakana? Any 'intelligent language detection' like Windows has (e.g., if I start typing in mixed case with paired consonants, assume that I'm typing in English)?

Thanks-in-advace!
 
For the first question, I'm not really sure. This isn't my area of expertise, but Tensai might suit your needs. MacUpdate has a few Japanese dictionaries listed, too.

As for the second question, you can do that by doing a click-and-hold on the text you're entering. A menu will appear with various other forms that you can switch to. You can also do these conversions from the input menu, which has keyboard shortcuts, too (control-J to convert to Hiragana, control-K for Hiragana, control-L for full-width romaji, and control-; for half-width romaji). If you don't have the input menu visible, you can enable it in the International preference pane.

Hope this helps.
 
You might want to try JEdict or Jisho. I use both. They do the trick for me. Just search them on versiontracker.
 
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