Tagaini Jisho is a free, open-source Japanese dictionary and kanji lookup tool that is available for Windows, MacOS X and Linux and aims at becoming your Japanese study assistant. It allows you to quickly search for entries and mark those that you wish to study, along with tags and personal notes. It also let you train entries you are studying and follows your progression in remembering them. Finally, it makes it easy to review entries you did not remember by listing them on screen or printing them on a small booklet.

Tagaini Jisho also features complete stroke order animations for more than 6000 kanji.

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Just a little more than one month after the previous version - are we going to have regular updates?

Changelog is modest though:

• Fixed some issues with kanji popup component highlighting
• Fixed romaji-to-kanji converter (digraphs were missing)
• Added option to hide English meanings when a translation is available

Nonetheless, hope you will enjoy it while some more exciting stuff is being developed.

The latest Tagaini update is now available! Apart from the usual bug fixes (0.9.2 was not quite bug-free) and new features (at long last, you can now search for Japanese text in romaji), the real novelty of this version resides in its use of new data. JLPT levels have been updated to follow the new levels (thanks to the data provided by the JLPT Resources Page). The interface is now available in many more languages thanks to the translator's work on Transifex (do not hesitate to join if you want to improve the coverage of Tagaini in your language!). Perhaps most important, Tagaini now takes advantage of the JMdict and kanjidic2 internationalization efforts. These are two new projects that aim at translating the Japanese dictionaries from English to other languages. Once again, participating is easy and fun, so please do not hesitate to contribute to them!

Full Changelog:

• Update JLPT lists to follow new N* scheme (thanks to the JLPT Resources Page: www.tanos.co.uk/jlpt/)
• Added optional link to example sentences on Tatoeba or jisho.org
• Plenty of new languages supported for GUI and databases: Italian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Vietnamese, ...
• Fix: do not display empty glosses for a language in detailed view
• Fixed wildcard search which was broken in previous version
• Core and SQLite modules are compiled as shared libraries, and SQLite module can be loaded as an SQLite extension
• Fixed database concurrency bugs
• Much faster mass-manipulation of entries
• Better handling of components with variations in kanji popup
• Allow romaji input for entries and kanji readings
• Improved searching of kanji per reading
• Fixed buggy part-of-speech search on 32 bits architectures
• Correctly update entries when a list operation is done on them

Good news for Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10 users: unofficial packages of Tagaini are available for these systems. Thanks to Geza Kovacs for maintaining them!

https://launchpad.net/~gezakovacs/+archive/tagainijisho

One of the most common complain about Tagaini Jisho from non-English users is the fact that the dictionaries not available in languages other than English, except for a few (and very partial) exceptions. This is about to change. We started a new community effort on Transifex to help translate JMdict and kanjidic2, the main data sources of Tagaini into your language:

https://www.transifex.net/projects/p/jmdict-i18n/

You can join one of the language teams (or ask to create new ones), and simply start translating dictionary and kanji entries. The result will be released under a Creative Commons licence, and will be integrated into Tagaini and potentially many other projects that use JMdict and kanjidic2.

Also see how to contribute efficiently here:

www.tagaini.net/jmdict-i18n

So, if you want to improve the landscape of Japanese study software, do not hesitate and join!

Do you like Tagaini Jisho? Tagaini is free software, but has a cost (in time, efforts and sometimes money) for its developer. You can show your appreciation by making a donation: