Using zKanji as a Study Tool
Wouldn't it be useful to have a Dictionary always at hand when you study Japanese? The free application zKanji can be installed on your own PC to support your studies.
What is zKanji
There is a free program named zKanji, available at http://zkanji.sourceforge.net/. It has built-in word and kanji dictionaries, and an optional (but highly recommended) database of sentence examples. It is extremely versatile when used as a study tool, helping with issues such as verb and adjective conjugations and finding out which particles are used with a verb, as well as the more obvious issues of vocabulary acquisition and learning to read kanji.
This article will give some tips on ways you can use zKanji to promote your Japanese language learning.
The Dictionary
The dictionary in zKanji can be used in two different modes; Full Size and Popup.
Full Size Mode
If you start the program normally, there will be three windows on the screen, one of which is the dictionary (the other two are the kanji window, and the study groups window).
Popup
If you click the minimize button on any of these windows, all three disappear and an icon for zKanji appears in your system tray. When zKanji is minimized, you can use the dictionary as a small popup window in the lower right hand corner of your screen. (You can adjust its size as needed.) This helps when you want to look at something else at the same time-- like the chat box at the StudyJapanese web site. You can make the popup visible by right clicking on the zKanji icon in the sytem tray and selecting either "Japanese to English" or "English to Japanese." (You can also configure keyboard shortcuts, like Ctrl+Alt+J and Ctrl+Alt+E to carry out these commands.) In the image below, the zKanji icon is the icon in the system tray which is a white box containing part of the red kanji 字 in handwritten style, and the popup dictionary is the window above the system tray. [Note: The image has not yet been updated, and shows an older version of the icon.]
Activities in the Dictionary
Here are some learning activities you can do with the dictionary.
Learn Hiragana
When the dictionary is in Japanese to English mode, it will convert roomaji (Roman letters) into hiragana as you type them into the Search window. If you type in words you are familiar with in roomaji, this is an easy way to see what they look like spelled in hiragana. It can also be used in place of an IME (input method)-- you can copy and paste the hiragana which appear in the Search window into another program (e.g. the StudyJapanese chat box). In the image below, the white text highlighted with blue is the result of typing "wakarimashita" or "wakarimasita."
Practice Conjugating Verbs and Adjectives
First make sure that the inflection ("Inf") button is toggled on (it will be blue) and that you are in Japanese to English mode. Now if you type an inflected word into the Search window, such as "wakarimashita" (わかりました), the dictionary will not only select the verb "wakaru" (分かる, わかる) in the results list, it will also tell you that the inflection you have typed in is the polite past (at the beginning of the meaning column-- see image above). Similarly, if you type in "hanasemasen", it will tell you that this is the potential, polite negative form of the verb "hanasu", meaning "to speak" (see image below), and if you type in "tanoshikatta", it will tell you that this is the (plain) past form of the adjective "tanoshii", meaning "enjoyable" or "fun". If you type in a wrong spelling, such as "kitte" when you really meant "kite", you will find out that you have conjugated a different verb than you intended to, or that you have written something which is not a correct spelling of a conjugation of any verb.
Check which particles go with a verb
Is it "nihongo o wakarimasu" or "nihongo ga wakarimasu"? If you're not sure, type "wakarimasu" or "wakaru" into the Search window. Make sure that the examples ("Ex") button is toggled on and that you have installed the examples database file. You can now step through many example sentences containing forms of the verb wakarimasu, and see what particles occur just before it (the form of "wakaru" will always appear in red). Press the forwards triangle button to get to the next sentence. You will find that "ga" often occurs, as does "wa", and (less often) "to", but that "o" never appears. (See the example sentence in the image with わかりました (wakarimashita) highlighted in blue.)
Explore how any word is used in the context of a sentence
Not sure how to use the word "suki"? Follow the instructions above, typing "suki" into the Search box. If there are words you don't know in an example sentence, position the mouse pointer over the word to get its pronunciation, and click on the word to go to its definition. Since you will still have the same example sentence showing, you can click on 好き to get back to more sentences for "suki."
[I will add more learning activities, and descriptions of other parts of the zKanji program.]
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Article by tony
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"The Corpus is a useful and interesting collection of matched Japanese and English sentence pairs, however it cannot be regarded as containing natural or representative examples of text in either language. This is because of the way it was originally compiled and the artificial nature of the sources. Also it still contains a large number of errors and repetitions. It certainly should not be used for any statistical analyses of the text. While the Corpus appears to be adequate and useful as a source of examples of word usage, the user is advised to be cautious and critical."
Therefore, it would probably be a good idea to get a second opinion on any examples you use from a native speaker or another resource just to make sure it is accurate(which makes sense for any resource you use anyway).
Happy studying! ;)
If you have a specific question, I may be able to answer it. Or you can contact zone-san (zone is his user name here)-- he is the author of the program.
Be sure that you downloaded the entire package, and not just the update file for people who have earlier versions.
I cant seem to understand how to use this baby:/
domo arigatou tony-san!
it does not highlighted even when pointing with cursor.
p/s: sorry 4 the previous message..
Ex button [left hand site]
The same is true of the "inf" button, which determines whether or not zkanji recognizes inflections of verbs or adjectives.
To see the sentence examples, you have to have the database file, examples.zkj, in the data subdirectory of your zkanji directory. examples.zkj is a separate download from the main program download. The link to download it is on the same page as the link to download the main program, however.
When you download the files, which are about 10MB each, check that the size of the file you downloaded matches the size posted on the web page.