Reading Japanese online if a piece of weasels when you set yourself up for it. If you don’t already know about these tools then you better get savvy! Both work the same: you hover over the nasty characters in question and a handy little translation with reading and definition pops up as a tool tip.

The original idea comes from the site Rikai.com. This developer geezer Todd in Tokyo has jigged up a useful service. If you are out and about, you can copy and paste text into the window and away you go. It doesn’t always work for web pages: sometimes the tool tip is masked or in the top left corner. Damn handy but, and based on (guru) Jim Breen’s work on EDICT.

It gets better if you are at home and you have Firefox, because then you can use Perapera-kun. Perapera-kun builds on what Rikai did. There is another tool called Rikai-chan that does the same thing. I used to use it, but switched to Perapera-kun – I don’t recall why, but I am sure there was a good reason.

Anyway, you install the Firefox add-on from here. Make sure you download the dictionaries too. There is also a Chinese version for anyone interested.

This is all for a PC. I assume that Macs work the same, but you never know.

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