JBrute Japanese Dictionary 1.5

JBrute is a stand-alone English?Japanese and Japanese ?English dictionary lookup program. It uses publicly available data for the dictionary and examples (see acknowledgements below). The version of these files packaged with the current distribution contains in excess of 141,000 dictionary entries and 151,000 usage examples.

I designed with an eye toward supporting beginning and intermediate English-speaking students of Japanese. Specifically

- Its good for studying non-electronic text (perhaps while writing a letter, during a lesson with a tutor or while reading an article). Significantly, you dont need to know exactly what you are looking for in order to find it. You can pretty easily do things like lookup words that use a particular Kanji or contain a particular (Kana) reading or whose definition includes a particular (English) word -- or any combination of these.

- It searches both the dictionary and the examples. This is really helpful to get a sense for grammatical constructs which do not lend themselves to dictionary definitions. Example: how do you say (to your ill Japanese friend) "is there anything I can do"? Try is there anything I can do (without quotes).

- Each dictionary entry includes both examples (where available, and they usually are) and information about each Kanji character used.

- It omits the huge volume of data of interest primarily to Japanese scholastic lexicographers (e.g. n different ways of indexing each Kanji)

- It supports the OSs native IME. Thus you can enter search terms in both English and Japanese. If you enter it in Japanese, you can even ?paint? the Kanji. If you dont know about the OSs IME, see the Help file.

Things its not. Its not a flash card application. Its not for adding ?hints? to web pages or Japanese email. It certainly makes not pretense to translate beyond a word or phrase level.

Requirements: Japanese Fonts