I’m in the last chapter of Genki 1 and i’ve already bought ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん in the physical form and just wanted to ask if there are any useful tools besides jisho.org to maybe explain grammatical structures in sentences and unknown words
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Right now the two tools I have in mind are
- ichi.moe (you can use this online keyboard), and
- this furigana dictionary.
You can also use ChatGPT, it’s very useful but sometimes it can be wrong so take what it says with a grain of salt… and maybe you already know Bunpro, you don’t need a subscription to have access to the content.
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ChatGPT can certainly be helpful, but the usual warnings apply: it will gladly spew complete nonsense from time to time.
Mokuro is pretty popular in these parts to make reading manga easier on computers, although I haven’t used it myself: Mokuro: Read Japanese manga with selectable text inside a browser
If you read physically you won’t be able to use Mokuro obviously, in this case you may find this took useful: https://kankan.pt/
It’s basically like jisho but it lets you search for partial kanji. So imagine if you encounter 科学 and you don’t know the word or the 科 kanji, but you can tell that there’s the 禾 radical in it so you can find it this way:
This is also useful if you see super complicated kanji that can be hard to read either because they’re too small and blurry or in a weird font. 憂鬱 may be hard to read, but you can probably tell that the first kanji has 夂 and the 2nd has 木 and 彡, so you can use:
But frankly the main tool you’ll need at first is a lot of patience. Reading is very slow at first, don’t get frustrated, take it one step at a time and don’t hesitate to “cheat” with an English translation if it becomes too hard or just if you want to check your understanding.
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For beginner level, I would use learnnatively to search for N5 manga level.
Then with mokuro you could try to read the sentences first then check the translation soon after.
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Yomichan/Yomitan can put in grammar dictionaries, though for using that with reading manga, you will be required to either type out the sentences yourself, or using OCR tools like Mokuro.
Otherwise, maybe ichi.moe or ChatGPT, but either typing out or OCR is still required.
That being said, jisho.org can parse sentences to some extent.
Of course you can also ask the community here (grammar thread / not-grammar thread), or join Book Clubs
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This changed a ton as I improved
Early on, I used a lot of ichi.moe, that was mentioned previously. It’s mainly good in that phase where you don’t know what most words in a sentence mean, or sometimes even how to break it down into words, though it does make some mistakes. As you improve your vocabulary and your ability to break down sentences, you will most likely want to use this less and less, since it takes quite a bit of time to take a sentence from a manga and type it out into ichi.moe, but also, it can act as a sort of crutch, allowing you to fully ignore the words and only attempt to piece together what happened from the english translations.
My dictionary of joice is Jotoba. It’s (in my opinion) a slightly more modern version of jisho, with some pretty nifty features, like kind of like kankan above, a radical picker that allows you to enter a similar looking kanji, break it into radicals and pick the ones that are part of your searched kanji, for example taking @simias example from earlier, if you want to find the kanji 科, and you know that it looks sorta like 料, you enter the latter, pick out the “斗” radical, and 科 immediately pops up.
For kanji lookup, especially if you read on your phone like I do, the handwritten input of gboard is awesome. It can recognize kanji decently even if you are nowhere near the actual kanji (probably based on stroke direction and such). It also ignores stroke order.
I’m also a big believer of the idea that translation engines can help you learn the language if used well. DeepL in this case works probably the best of what I tried (though chatgpt might work very very slightly better in some cases). The important thing is that you don’t rely on them, only when nothing else can crack a sentence, and even then you want to work backwards to see why that sentence means what it means.
Nowadays I mostly either don’t really look up words unless the material is very dense and full of unknown stuff, or if I’m reading a novel, I do that on a kindle, and those have an ok dictionary look up feature (which isn’t present in the app sadly).
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Jisho also has a radical picker function. Only difference from what I can see is that the result kanji pop up in their own area without descriptions rather than in the search results.
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The difference is that kankan considers the whole word, not individual kanji. There are thousands of kanji that contain ⺾ but only a few words have two kanji using ⺾ in a row and then 色:
I don’t believe that this type of search is feasible with jisho.
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Nobody mentioned yet, but looking up on a smartphone app with touchscreen, can help. I am not sure the actual speed difference, but mobile apps (i.e. Android or iOS) may be faster to use the websites, and they may have functions to navigate Kanji components / larger Kanji. Some may be able to navigate composed vocabularies as well.
Gboard handwriting input, or other dedicated IME, usually recognize Kanji better than built-in handwriting pad of a dictionary app.
Anyway, imo, getting into reading at all, at a snail’s space, the first problem is gonna how sentences make sense at all, and so, figuring out words (or phrases) to be looked up – word boundaries and conjugations. That is, grammar, and a little experience of colloquial contractions and stuff.
Numbers usually don’t have Furigana, and figuring out how to read is also grammar.
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That’s true! For compound words, this function is very useful.
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That was the first manga I finished! I hope you enjoy it.
In comparison to earlier attempts to join the ABBC, what got me through was patience and sticking with it day to day. Check the book club threads as probably someone else asked about it if you’re stuck on something. And you can still ask questions, someone nice is probably still hanging around and can help you. As others have said, just learning to parse sentences will be your first hurdle. All the other resources mentioned are really great, but at the very beginning stage, the book club threads will probably be the easiest way to find explanations that are relevant to what you’re trying to figure out.
The other thing that helps is to read a section, like 2-4 pages, even if you don’t understand all of it. It gives you context so when you go back and start doing lookups, then it will make more sense in the bigger picture.
And if at some point you are looking for other tools (but as above, I don’t think you necessarily need more):
For grammar, in my first few books I did get really good use out of this Japanese Grammar Dictionary
And mostly, I learned grammar by reading stories on Satori which I used before, alongside, and after reading my first manga and other Japanese books. I would learn a lot of the grammar on Satori, and then recognise it in manga like ちいさな森のオオカミちゃん and it made it so much easier to keep going.
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I just finished page 13, so far it’s been great. I don’t have to look up everything and for my first actual native reading experience, that’s great. I’ve already studied the vocabulary from the list online though. But the grammar isn’t really as hard as i expected. I can just understand parts of grammar i dont know through context and it works most of the time
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This is more for the non-physical side of things, but I figured I’d just mention it now, since it came to mind.
The above link is an Android app, which essentially adds an overlay to your screen for easy selective OCR. It can be tricky to use at first, but once you get the hang of using the filter, it can be very useful.
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You know it never hurts to write a simple “thank you everyone” or something like that, to acknowledge all the other people who took the time to answer 
oh sry, forgot about that. Thanks everyone for the help so far and all of them are pretty much good suggestions
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