JPaste.me : new website to help your read Japanese!

[rlemaigre]

Hello everyone !

I’d like to share with you a small project of mine It’s a website that lets you submit Japanese text to get reading aids to understand it. Once your text has been processed, you may click on any word to get information about the meanings, reading, kanji and statistics about word and kanji frequencies. You can also hear the words being pronounced. It is 100% free, although I may put ads to cover the hosting costs at some point.

Tell me if you have ideas about how to improve it. And don’t hesitate to share the link !

I hope you like it !

https://jpaste.me/

[Fantastic_Fico]

Great wesbite!
I think having a button to return to the kanji selection (after clicking “details” for a specific kanji) would be nice. But it would be more of a quality of life improvement and nothing tooooo important or special.

[rlemaigre]

Hello, thank you for your appreciation

At the bottom of the black box, you have a “breadcrumb” with a back button on the left to return to the word. Perhaps I could make it more visible :

[Lswan]

oh cool! I get daily snippets from Bunsuke sent to my email box and I really struggle with the text! I like to write out line by line and try to translate it piece by piece and then put it all together then check the translation at the end. This should help me a lot. I’ll try to use it next time I study. Thank you so much for sharing this!

[Kazzeon]

Interesting, I’ll see what happens with my discord about me.

もしも願い一つだけ叶うなら
君のそばで眠らせて
どんな場所でもいいよ

That thing with the back button doesn’t show up if you’re in the vocab tab, it just takes you to a new page.

It got them all right, except for 願い, it’s picking it up as 願う, even though you do have it here.

You can also see it doesn’t get any hiragana words, which is not great, since it says kanji and vocabulary.

Vocabulary page seems fine, except what I said before.

I also entered a random word in the search bar, as you can see here, and it kinda messes up the layout.

But you can click it and it sends you to the kanji page.

You can also search words that aren’t there and it gives you the page with the sound, but nothing else as it doesn’t have them. Which is better than nothing in this case, I guess.

Going back to the intended functionalities.

What are the stars for, and why are some of them greyed out?

These seem to come from jisho, or whatever database they use.

So, old boy?

Within my ability?

Looks like a nice project, and it’s something I’m too lazy to do, but besides the percentages, I don’t see any extra features compared to any online dictionary plus Google Translate for the audio.

Being able to input a whole paragraph and look at the words in the same page is nice, though.

I tried it with a random paragraph from The Little Prince, and you can see it didn’t get some words:

飲みこみ probably because of the hiragana
動けなくなって probably because of the conjugation
６か月 maybe the か? but not even 月 by itself.

I think that’s all I got.

Hope I don’t sound rude or like I’m nitpicking, I just like to test websites.
Maybe some of this will be useful to you.

[rlemaigre]

Thank you for your interest and in depth review I don’t know Japanese myself (just have an interest for it) so it is difficult for me to judge the quality of what the website produces. That’s why reviews like yours are very valuable to help me improve the service in the future.

That being said, writing that it isn’t any better than any online dictionary + Google Translate is a bit unfair. It is based on mostly the same datasets as Jisho, so you can’t expect to find anymore information (although statistics about Kanji readings are unique, I think). Rather, the point of this is to make accessing the information as straightforward as possible : just a click on a word straight from the text where it belongs and you get everything you need in a nice popup window

[Kazzeon]

I get you.

@Kazzeon

Being able to input a whole paragraph and look at the words in the same page is nice, though.

And it is convenient, up to a point.

If you add hiragana and fix the small issues, it should be able to compete with sites like ichi.moe for people who prefer your layout.

Good luck.