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LATEST VERSION
1.01 (2008/03/29)

What is Jiten?

Jiten is a Japanese word. It means dictionary. And that is what this software is all about. A simple and effective cross-reference between Romaji and English.

It all started when I saw a program (called !Jiten) for RISC OS. This freeware creation by Philip Murray-Pearce was quite useful in getting a sense of what things meant - animé theme tunes and the like. I also liked that it displayed the Kanji (or Katakana/Hiragana) for the Japanese word. In this picture you can see I have looked up omoide:

The RISC OS !Jiten

The problem is that it is not always convenient to start up RedSquirrel (or my actual RiscPC!) in order to look up Japanese words. Say I'm listening to a song and I think "mmmm, wonder what 'kokoro' means?". It can take many minutes to get to a situation where I am able to load !Jiten.

As a programmer, the solution was simple. Figure out just enough of how Philip's program works to permit me to write my own lookee-likee for use under Windows. Now getting Jiten (my version) running is a matter of finding it in the Start menu and waiting a few seconds for it to load its data. Piece of cake!

Here's what my version of Jiten looks like:

My Windows version of Jiten

In addition, so you do not have to remember the abbreviations (for example, if you see the following:

A word with abbreviations.
All you need to do is double-click the word to display a list of abbreviations so you can find out the "(id) (uk)" means the word is an ideomatic expression that is usually written using kana.

The abbreviations are:

The abbreviations list
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Copyright © 2008 Rick Murray