You’ll hear it a lot from everyone here – Japanese, non-Japanese, it doesn’t matter. Kanji (漢字) is hard. That’s the truth, plain and simple. But in this day and age when you can get a plug-in for just about everything, is Japanese still that hard?
Perhaps not. Let me show you why.
Browsing through Japanese (日本語) websites, and unfortunately that’s all you’ll be looking at to get most things done in Tokyo (東京), is taxing. Like, what does it all mean? A simple way to find out would be to feed the URL to Google Translate and read their best efforts to crack all of that kanji.
But as you probably know by now, Google Translate, for all its utility, is just as flawed and confused as the rest of us.
Some might even say more so than the best of us.
This is where browser plug-ins come in. Thank the internet, help has arrived in the form of useful add-ons like rikaikun and nazeka. These neat little bits of code translate Japanese with the click of – wait for it – NO buttons. Unless you don’t count the click to activate them, that is.
Once active, rikaikun, nazeka, and any other Japanese plug-in, will provide you with a gloss of whatever kanji or Japanese you hover over – including the kanji itself, the hiragana, and the English translation. They may not work to the scale of Google Translate, but you can rest assured that you get proper translations. It’s definitely a great way to start building up on your Japanese vocabulary.
What are you waiting for then? Plug these in (rikaikun for Chrome and nazeka for Firefox) and play around with the kanji you see in our other articles. There’s no better time to start learning than the present!
Happy hunting!
