Frequently Asked Questions
Basics
- Who maintains the JMdict and kanjidic2 dictionaries?
- Does Tensai require an internet connection?
- How do I type in Japanese?
- Is there any good way to lookup kanji?
- Why does it take so long to search for "i" (or other short words)?
- How do I cancel a search if it’s taking too long?
- What are these ‘Entities’ in the preferences?
- What are these ‘Themes’ in the preferences?
Feature Requests
- Tensai is great! How about making it into a Dashboard widget?
- Japanese is all well and good, but what about adding other languages?
- Will Tensai ever have romaji support?
- What about including Ruby text, a.k.a. furigana?
- Can you include SKIP codes in the kanjidic2 part of Tensai?
Troubleshooting
- Tensai’s grouping doesn’t always group entries that belong together, what’s up with that?
- There are gaps in the grid lines of my results, is this a bug?
- How do I change the font size of results?
- How do I print results & vocabulary lists?
- How do I import additional dictionaries?
- How do I change the shortcut for the "Look Up in Tensai" service?
Answers
Who maintains the JMdict and kanjidic2 dictionaries?
JMdict and kanjidic2 are both maintained by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group at Monash University in Australia. The files are the XML format successors to the old EDICT and KANJIDIC projects. Their dictionaries are free for public use and distribution as long as everyone knows who to thank for all the hard work they’ve put into maintaining them.
So no, I didn’t make the dictionaries, just a program to make them more useful.
Does Tensai require an internet connection?
The only time Tensai connects to the Internet is when it checks for updates, which it does once per day when run. So no, Tensai doesn’t get its results by querying the WWWJDIC website. You can use Tensai on your PowerBook during the flight to Japan and won’t have to pay exorbitant WiFi fees to do so.
How do I type in Japanese?
Rather than do a poor job of explaining this, I’ll just say: Go to the Finder. Select "Mac Help" from the "Help" Menu. Make sure you have "Mac Help" selected under the home button in the help window. Search for "Input Menu". Click on "About input methods for different languages". Follow the steps outlined by Apple. Voilà.
Once you have the Japanese keyboard layout active, just type into Tensai’s search field. Typing Japanese on a computer is interesting, because you’re basically typing in romaji and it transforms into kana before your eyes. To turn kana into kanji, hit the space bar until you get what you want. Play around with it — it’s very important to Japanese students.
Is there any good way to lookup kanji?
The searching of kanjidic2 will be greatly improved in future versions, but for now I suggest you go to the Edit Menu and explore the wonders of the "Special Characters…" menu item. Change "View" to Japanese and select the "by Radical" tab. Now you can browse all kanji by radical and stroke count. To add a kanji from the Character Palette to your Tensai search, make sure the search field is active in Tensai and the character of interest is selected, then click the "Insert" button. Kind of an out of the way method to lookup characters, but it beats most kanji lookup programs.
Why does it take so long to search for "i" (or other short words)?
First understand that JMdict stands for Japanese-Multilingual dictionary, not Multilingual-Japanese dictionary. It’s designed for finding what Japanese words mean in other languages. To find the Japanese words which mean the same as "I" in English, you will have to refine your search.
First try changing the search type from "Contains" to "Whole Words". Any search which returns more than about 500 entries will take a couple seconds to display its results. There are over 75,000 entries in JMdict which contain the letter "i", meaning you’ll be waiting about 10 minutes on even the most powerful Mac for those results to show up. A "Whole words" search, on the other hand, returns just 186 entries, the first of 8 of which are all of the words in JMdict meaning "I". By choosing the right search type, you can reduce the number of false positives you get and find what you’re looking for even faster.
How do I cancel a search if it’s taking too long?
As of Tensai 0.91, active searches can be cancelled. So if you find a search is taking too long, just change your search string or click the cancel button in the search field and refine your search.
What are these ‘Entities’ in the preferences?
XML files like JMdict and kanjidic2 have made up codenames for frequently used words and phrases like "noun" and "honorific language". These are called entities and each file includes its own default list of substitutions to make for each codename. The defaults, however, are very verbose.
JMdict’s defaults say that ご苦労さま part of speech is "adjectival nouns or quasi-adjectives (keiyodoshi), Expressions (phrases, clauses, etc.), interjection (kandoushi), noun (common) (futsuumeishi)". That wraps to 3 lines in Tensai on my computer. To save space and make things much more readable, I made my own set of entity substitutions, called "Simple English" in the preferences, and set them as the default when you first run Tensai. So instead of the above you just get "~na adjective, expression, interjection, noun", which fits on one line.
I’ve made it possible for anyone to make their own entity substitutions file and use it with Tensai. If you don’t like the substitutions you have to choose from, like if you’d rather call a five-step verb a "godan verb" or "五段動詞", then go right ahead. The JMdict DTD can be found here — just change its entities definitions to your liking and send them to me for inclusion in the next release of Tensai.
What are these ‘Themes’ in the preferences?
Tensai’s results are all displayed the user as HTML, but those results initially come out as XML. If you know XSL and CSS, or are willing to learn, you can alter the results to look like anything you want. Tensai’s features are still in flux, so I can’t guarantee any user created themes will work with Tensai 1.0.
Tensai is great! How about making it into a Dashboard widget?
I want to finish Tensai 1.0 before I even think about making a widget for it.
Japanese is all well and good, but what about adding other languages?
Tensai is still in beta. To keep things manageable, I’m going to keep it Japanese only until I get its features finalized and properly implemented. If you know of any dictionaries you’d like included, please tell me. Note: I already know about CEDICT.
Will Tensai ever have romaji support?
The short answer is no. Romaji is something I once considered adding, but now I’m actually intent on not including romaji anywhere in Tensai. In my experience from having studied Japanese in college, people use romaji as a crutch and have a harder time learning Japanese as a result. I feel that giving users the option to view results in romaji would remove their incentive to learn kana and hold them back in their studies.
I’m considering making a separate kana drilling program to quickly teach people kana recognition through sight and sound.
What about including Ruby text, a.k.a. furigana?
First, for those who don’t know, Ruby text is what it’s called in English when you put info in small letters above words. For compounds which are hard-linked to one reading, giving them Ruby text would be simple. For compounds with multiple readings, however, it is impossible to accurately choose the correct reading. For that reason, Ruby text isn’t a part of Tensai yet.
Can you include SKIP codes in the kanjidic2 part of Tensai?
While SKIP codes are included in the kanjidic2 files, I am not legally allowed to let you use them until Jack Halpern, the copyright and patent holder of SKIP codes gives me permission to do so. He won’t do that unless I give him money which I don’t have.
Tensai’s grouping doesn’t always group entries that belong together, what’s up with that?
The grouping in Tensai is all derived from the groups built into the JMdict format. JMdict is constantly under revision, and with each new version comes more grouped entries. If you find separate entries which you think should be grouped together, there’s a form on the WWWJDIC website for notifying the people there.
There are gaps in the grid lines of my results, is this a bug?
As best as I can tell, that’s a bug in Safari’s CSS implementation. The CSS I use to make the grids for results works perfectly in Firefox, which is generally a more standards compliant browser I think, so I’m pretty sure it’s not my fault. There are some hidden CSS elements in WebKit which I may be able to use to make grids work right, but it’ll take some investigation.
I don’t believe those incomplete grid lines make the results confusing or hard to read, so unless people tell me otherwise, fixing the grid display isn’t a high priority.
How do I change the font size of results?
Just like in Safari. Go to the "View" menu to choose "Make Text Bigger" or "Make Text Smaller". Or you can use the keyboard shortcuts Command-= and Command–. Resizing works on the results as a whole, there is currently no way to resize individual fields separately.
How do I print results & vocabulary lists?
You can’t yet. That’s another feature for a future release.
How do I import additional dictionaries?
You can’t do that yet either. Yet another feature for the future.
How do I change the shortcut for the "Look Up in Tensai" service?
If you go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab under the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane in System Preferences, you can set Tensai’s shortcut to whatever you’d like. Just click the add button (the plus below the table) and in the sheet that slides down, fill in the following information:
Application: All Applications
Menu Title: Look Up in Tensai
Keyboard Shortcut: whatever you want the shortcut to be
Applications will have to be relaunched for the new shortcut to work in them.