This week's review is for Jisho.org. I would recommend it for all levels of learners. The website covers most areas of the Vocabulary, Grammar, Stroke Order, Example Sentences, Kanji and general dictionary functions. Jisho is an encyclopaedia that is having an identity crisis it seems.
What
Jisho is a Dictionary Website, which means dictionary. Searchbar is the main tool of searching Jisho, and where you will start your journey into the pit of the advanced searchbar when we all realize it is a Dictionary with an identity crisis in that it wants to be an Encyclopaedia which didn't quite grasp the depth of the datasets required to do this. The lemmas are not propositions after all. Searchbar results return back romaji readings and alternative search spellings.
Next to the bar, the ability to search by Draw, Radicals and Voice which allow you to search using these tools to search around the website.
Below this, we find the total number of search results, furigana, Kanji pictographs, several indexical signposts such as 'common word' JLPT level and Wanikani level. Then play audio, collocation (similar meaning terms) and Links, which provides further examples and 'Kanji details'.
We then find the definition and type of word such as noun and definition. To the right, names are listed, and More Names and other Dictionaries. More words then follows on until the end/
Kanji details takes you to a similar page, pictograph and semantical definition. Then on the left, the stroke number, radicals used and 'parts' which are closer to what we may call radicals following Heisigs methodology. Then there are also variants of these which have more complicated versions of the pictograph. A handy stroke order animation is displayed below these.
Atop, you have the Forum, About, Theme and Login sections. The Forum section is more or less a type of social media feed, About section gives a list of credits to original content creators and site creatives, Theme gives Night/Day lighting options and Log in allows you to log into the website with an account to log your way around the site.
After definition, you get to Kun/Onyomi, hyperlinks for words starting/ending/containing the pictograph involved and external links to Unihan, Wiktionary and Google Image Search. Next to these are the Joyo, JLPT and frequency metric grading of the Kanji. Below that is the Stroke Order and text-to-speech versions of these. Compounds lists reading variations of the kanji affixation/collocationary nature of the pictograph (Kanji-ish/Radical) to other Kanji. Kun reading compounds are then provided. Other Readings or more accurately translations are then provided into other languages.
Dictionary Indices provide references to various dictionarys for the pictograph involved. Some of these methodologies may be more suited to your learning needs and are pretty much considered established versions to self taught learners of the language it seems. Classifications and Codepoints refers to the points for Kun/Onyomi readings and coding languages in wider datasets and corpuses such as Mark Spahns The Learners Kanji Dictionary. I do not personally recommend learning the Kun/Onyomi as they will and wont be important, depending on your needs (see https://archive.org/details/learnerskanjidic00mark/page/n5/mode/1up). .
https://jisho.org/docs has a more robust listing of the search functions, but it essentially has the non-initial user friendly pitfalls of converting Romaji/Standard Englishes into the kana equivalent. Searching for a specific phrase requires using an asterisk or little star icon (*). Years and dates also seem to work a bit funky, but does follow the Japanese system of dates which works out for the best. Additive search also mean you need to use a "find this phrase" rather than 'find this "phrase"' format. AND or OR may also be useful if you need to use this type of search into Google, as searches are otherwise automatically single word formatted. Hashtags are also prominently used and a list is provided in the advanced search section, including grammatical searches.[1]
Where
Available at https://jisho.org/search/jisho .
Who
The Jisho site is belongs to its respective creators of Kim Ahlström, Miwa Ahlström and Andrew. Plummer. Graphics and other contents to Brian Takumi and Sophian Bensaou and is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 and GNU Free Documentation License.
Other respective content belongs to:
- DBpedia content comes from Wikipedia, and is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 and GNU Free Documentation License.
- EDRDG Tanaka Corpus, JMDict, JMnedict, KanjiDIC2 and RADKFILE belongs to EDRDG project, with contributions from Jim Breen at the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group and is licensed under the projects various licenses.
- KanjiVG content belongs to Ulrich Apel and is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0.
- kanjivg2svg content belongs to the Jisho project and is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 and GNU Free Documentation License.
- Kradfile2 & kradfile-u belongs to Micheal Raine, with contributions by Breen and Jim Rose of the EDRDG project.
- JMdict Database system belongs to Stuart McGraw and is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0.
- J-Reibun belongs to Suzuki Tomomi, under copyright with plans to become open source. Contributors include Yoshiba, Junko Asano, Ryoko Ieda Akiko, Yoko, Oyama Yuuri, Oka Yoko, Kajikawa, Katsuya Kato Rie, Shibuya Hiroko, Tamaru Nozomi, Nakamura Ami, Nishijima Eriko, Noda Taishi, Haruna Fujimura, Yasuko Mitani and Kim Ahlstrom.
- MeCab belongs to Taku Kudo and the Free Software Foundation, under the FSF 2007 GNU/GPL license.
- SKIP (System of Kanji Indexing by Patterns) system for ordering kanji content belonfs to Jack Halpern (Kanji Dictionary Publishing Society at http://www.kanji.org/), and is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0 International.
- Tanaka Corpus comes from the work of Yasuhito Tanaka & many University Students and is licensed in the public domain.
- Tanos content comes from Jonathan Waller and is licensed under Creative Commons 4.0.
- Tatoeba content belongs to Trang Ho. and is licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.
- Ve content belongs to Kim Ahlstrom and is licensed under a public domain license/FSF 2007 GNU/GPL license.
- Wanakana content belongs to Tofugu and is licensed under the Open Source Initiative MIT License.
These all have many, many people involved in these projects whom I would love to highlight if they wish to be.
When
Available 24/7, also has an app which is free, might require subscription though for some features.
Why
I would recommend Jisho.org as a study tool guide. It can make finding a nice creative commons version a lot easier.
Bibliography
[1] https://jisho.org/docs
Socials
Email : learnjapanese43@gmail.com
Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:LearnJapanese43
Discord : @learnjapaneseforfree
Tiktok : @learnjapaneseforfree
Youtube: @learnjapaneseforfree /LJ43?
This review is part of the Learn Japanese for free project. I have, do not and never will derive any profit from this project. Please send any requests, questions or further information about free tools for learning Japanese to learnjapanese43@gmail.com which is checked every 2 weeks.
_-_planche_216.jpg)
