Your aim should be to increase this speed as quickly and efficiently as possible. The answer, in my view, is this: The less skilled you are at Japanese, the slower you can imbibe Japanese media. I have heard some folks say that since one aims to learn all Japanese words anyway, why worry about frequency? This also allows a very rough cross‐check between two frequency assessments, which is also useful. I don’t bother with the news even in English. I find that reassuring as I don’t really find newspaper‐language all that useful. Rather than newspapers, it is distilled from 5000+ novels. This more detailed Rikaisama frequency information is also taken from a different source from the (P) classification. The number is also color‐coded: Green=very common, dull greeny-yellow=common, orange=less common, pink=relatively rare. In addition to the old (P) used to indicate if a word is common (it is still there-Rikaisama hasn’t taken anything away from her little sister), there is more kuwashii frequency information in the form of a number that tells you how many words are more frequent than the one you are looking at (so 5 would be a very common word and 10000 would be a rare one).
You can also install Epwing dictionaries, but I am afraid they don’t work on Mac either, and I have no experience of them.Īn important point is that if you are in Sanseido mode (and presumably in J-J epwing mode) when you do use the direct-to-Anki feature, you get J-J (Japanese word with Japanese definition) cards.
The only small drawback is that you can’t download the Sanseido dictionary, so there is a small delay while it downloads the definition each time (and it won’t work at all offline). You can switch between the three (E‐definition, J‐definition, and no definition) with a keypress.
You were always able to turn definitions on and off, so you just got interactive furigana, but now you can also get a J‐J definition. It allows access to the Sanseido (that big chain bookstore you see everywhere in Japan) dictionary.
If anyone wants to add something on that, please feel free to use the comment section below. There are special instructions for getting the voices on Linux, but it seems that on a Mac there is no way.
I just followed the Windows instructions and it worked fine. Actually no OSX installation instructions for Rikaisama are given at all. Apparently you can also add the sound of the word, but…Īctual native‐voiced audio readings are another important new feature of Rikaisama, but that has been rather disappointing to this doll as they just don’t seem to work with the Mac OS. This is really useful and saves a lot of time. You also have the option of putting the kana on the front.
You need to install the associated Anki add-on, but once you’ve done that, a single keypress while hovering over a word will create a card for it with the kanji on the front, kana‐reading and meaning on the back. The direct‐to‐Anki feature is a blessing. Nothing has actually changed, but several things have been added.Īmong these new additions, the most important are: direct on‐the‐fly addition to Anki, human voice pronunciation of words, Sanseido mode (optional Japanese definitions instead of English), pitch information, and new frequency information. Still the Japanese dictionary add-on for Firefox that works the same way and keeps all your Rikaichan settings (in a few places she still refers to herself as Rikaichan) and looks just the same. Sounds like a very big sister, doesn’t she? How does she measure up? Now Rikaichan has a big sister: Rikaisama. We have written extensively about Rikaichan because in our view it is one of the most important tools in the arsenal (if you’ll excuse the mildly mixed metaphor) of an online Japanese learner.