Japanese on Android 2014

I've been writing a lot recently about the aedict 3 Japanese dictionary. I guess that says a lot about how important the app is for me, plus its one of the topics I know gets attention (there's no point talking to an empty room, right?*). In my previous post I touched on the various problems with Japanese on Android, and how far things have come, and I think now is an interesting time to look at the situation in more detail.

Firstly, some background: I first got a smartphone to integrate my mp3 player, phone, and my (super-chunky) electronic dictionary into one device. Juggling all three on the bumpity bus to work each day was somewhat tiring. That was something like 2010 or so.

Four years have passed and my phone has retired**, I've transitioned to a 7" Google Nexus tablet (the first version), and gone back to using a non-smartphone***. This reflects the fact I now get my Japanese literature in electronic form (Kindle can be coaxed into downloading Japanese books, even if you're living abroad), and the Nexus 7 is just small enough to fit into my trouser pockets if necessary (though given the comments from my wife, I wouldn't say it was a fashionable approach... *4*).

This brings me onto my first point: reading e-literature in Japanese has really become viable now. There are a plethora of pdf readers, and book stores are also adapting to the Android format. The obvious example is Kindle, which is a very nice reader. It includes a dictionary feature, too, which makes things decidedly easier.

However, if you want to read material from a PDF (the format is standard in the sciences and technical journals worldwide, including Japan) standards slip. English in PDFs is easy, I've used several PDF readers before; however, if you're reading Japanese text, you will inevitably come across a character you don't know, at which point you'll probably hold your finger down on the said character and one of three things will happen:

1. Nothing; Your PDF viewer is rubbish. Do not pass go, do not collect £200.
2. You'll select just 1 of the 4 characters you want; You must fiddle with text selection widgets. Miss a turn.
3. The whole sentence will get selected; You must fiddle with deleting the unwanted text. Miss a turn.

Problem 1 is spectacularly common, and can only be overcome by getting another PDF viewer, which will often be exactly the same, or will lead you to problems 2 & 3.

Recently I happened upon Radaee PDF Reader. The text selection works on a more Japanese-friendly basis by initiating text selection after a long press, and allowing you to select more text by simply dragging that press along. Sounds great? Maybe not. Given the "long-press, fiddle" orthodox that almost all the other apps employ, Radaee's method doesn't come naturally. Worse, Radaee's whitespace detection is buggy; for those documents which Adobe exhibits problem 3 (those odd, old-looking, grainy documents), Radaee will insert a space between each letter, so you end up having to edit the copied text anyway.

The above problems are inherent to a host of apps; Kingsoft Office defaults to problem 3, Google's apps default to either 1 (e.g. quickoffice for PDFs) or 2 (web browsing and such).

Where the text selection is robust, as is my experience with most of Google's apps, this isn't much of a problem; however, there is a huge population (I assume Chinese, which also lacks whitespace, also has this problem) for which the text selection is not greatly intuitive.

My next observation is that of input methods. I spent more than 3 years using freely available input methods, and the Google Japanese input is still a pretty solid input method, especially if you use a keyboard much. Nonetheless, I've always dreamed of the ability to write Japanese characters by hand; a function so necessary to looking up words in Japanese. I had high hopes for Hanwriting, which enabled handwritten input; however, in practice it is pretty terrible. Newer input methods appear to have made up the ground; however, and with Swype input, I could easily, and consistently get the right character, despite my terrible handwriting and funky stroke order. My hope is these features will get integrated into Google's default input methods, but I'm not sure what the chances of this are (Google will make more money if you have to buy a keyboard app than if they spend the hours to implement the feature, though it could be argued that increasing usability makes Android more appealing to customers from the start..). I should point out that I now have a Windows 8.1 tablet/notebook and it has Japanese handwriting recognition out-of-the-box (well, I did buy it in Japan, but for overseas users, it should just be a simple, free IME download)

Flashcard programs have been around for ages, and I still use Ankidroid now. I don't think there is much development that can really occur on that front, nor do I think it is needed.

Combine all of the above with email/LINE and a friend or two, and you have pretty much all the resources you'll ever need to learn, and enjoy Japanese, all in your pocket. A handful of enhancements are all that are really needed to make Japanese on Android completely seamless.



*I do that too, mind...

**It no longer connects to any networks, effectively making it a terribly slow, terribly small tablet.. *5*

*** That said, even the "normal" phones in Japan have always been more functional than non-smartphones in the UK, for as long as I've known them. But it looks like non-smartphones are on their way out now, the guy in the Softbank store say they're the only company signing new contracts on traditional phones. Not sure if that is true.

*4* Is that a 7" tablet in your pocket, or...?

Racism in Japan

A Google search for "ANA CM 批判" (ANA advert criticism) on the 29th: Almost all the hits on the first page are either completely neutral Japanese news articles, or news regarding LiLiCo's comments on the issue: "Do foreigners who come to Japan have so much free time [to make comments like that]?", and "as a foreigner myself, I find it very embarrassing".

Now, there are 2 points about this. Firstly, there are foreigners over here who feel, as I do, that crying out racism over adverts like that of the ANA actually is more of an embarrassment than the ad itself.

Secondly, LiLiCo's sentiment was regurgitated on the 2nd, 3rd and 7th results of a page full of otherwise neutral news.

On reflection, there is racism towards us with lighter hair and bigger noses in Japan*; however, I'm am dubious that the advert plays a significant role in this, and when criticism of the advert leads to news and blog articles that portray such criticism as childish (as I said it would), then I suspect that does more damage to the image of Westerners in Japan.

In my opinion, this is a cache 22. I'm beginning to think the advert should never have been released, and if someone finds the advert offensive, they have a right to speak out; however, the very act of speaking out makes us a target for more confusion.

It could be argued that we should speak out anyway, and this has been a way forward for a lot of civil rights movements. However, I don't feel oppressed here, and all while that is the case, I'm happy to find other ways of changing people's perceptions than complaining.


*that said, I've never been the victim of such racism, nor do I know anyone who was. In fact the closest I've come to Japanese racism is being told that my friend's friend (whom I didn't know) had been victimised, which represents 1 of more than a hundred overseas students at that time. Either I was lucky and surrounded by lucky people, or racism just isn't as big a problem in Okayama, where I did my exchange. In contrast, I've heard racism on my handful of visits to London, but again, perhaps that is more to do with location, the rest of the South that I've been to seems pretty OK.

Aedict3, all grown up

I know I've been going on somewhat about aedict 3 recently, but it has been developing at a considerable rate lately, and after giving it some more thorough use, I thought it worth a little note here.

I'm not sure exactly when it was brought in, but aedict now has a "live search" function. When I read that in the changelog, I wasn't particularly impressed; I figured how much time does it save having to not press a button? However, it is surprising how convenient this little feature is!

Firstly, I found the time savings are actually fairly considerable in most cases (qualitatively speaking). However, what I love most about this feature is that it provides a text glossing functionality akin to the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development group's very own site*.

What is the fuss about text glossing? Well, a lot of well-known apps like "Kingsoft Office" and "Adobe Reader" are terrible at selecting Japanese text. The problem appears to be that they are used to separating words by spaces and punctuation, as we do in English. However, Japanese doesn't use whitespace characters, and so when you hold your finger on a word in either of the above programs (and I'm sure they're not the only ones**), it selects between the two nearest punctuation, which might contain several words.

After selecting Japanese text in such a program, you then have 2 options: Firstly, you can use the fiddly text selection controls to highlight just the word you want to copy into the dictionary. Secondly, you can copy the whole sentence, then edit it once you've pasted into the dictionary.

The advantage in having text glossing is that you can just dump the whole sentence into the dictionary's input box, and you get a translation of all the words in the sentence. No fiddling with text selections, no editing of the sentence; a huge time saver, especially considering the text glossing is included in the live search, so you just paste, sit back and watch the magic.

Ultimately, my praise here is as much a reflection of my frustration with other programs (such as Kingsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat) that do the bare minimum to support Japanese text. Nonetheless, if you do a lot of work with Japanese documents (I do some freelance translation, and read the odd scientific article**** in Japanese), then you will frequently need to work around this problem. Aedict3 has made this process about as painless as I expect things will get, and for those who do a lot of reading of Japanese on their android devices, I highly recommend dishing out for Aedict3.


* For the unaware, the EDRDG is the home of edict and JMdict, which is integral to aedict. I'm not sure about the specifics, but without it, and the work of Jim Breen, we'd probably be a lot poorer in the dictionary department.

** Because how do you write a program to detect word edges in Japanese? It would be very difficult, I think. A work around would be to only select contiguous kanji characters. This would make selecting hiragana words more difficult***; however, because hiragana is phonetic, it is easy to reproduce by typing elsewhere, if needs be.

*** you'd have to drag the selection over the characters you wanted, which people do when they want to select more than one word of English anyway. So not spectacularly more difficult, really.

**** scientific articles are commonly distributed as pdf files.

Racism bad! Naughty Japan!

So, recently ANA pulled an advert because it was deemed racist. Go ahead and watch that link.

Personally I thought it was hilarious, but then I've been absorbing Japanese comedy for a few years now. Sure it picks on a stereotype, but I think Rupert Wingfield Hayes' analysis on this is pretty much on the mark*.

What annoys me more than anything is the reflex RACISM! reaction that lead to the advert getting pulled.

I'm not sure where the apparent outcry originated, but by the gods I hope it wasn't foreigners. Why? Because it does foreigners much more harm to the reputation of Westerners to complain about the advert's racism than this advert itself does.

In case you don't follow my logic here, remember what happened to all the foreigners when Fukushima underwent meltdown? About 500,000 of them smegged off, and as a result, the term "flyjin" was coined. Yes, that's even more derogatory than the advert, and twice as funny, in my opinion.

The point is, every time a kneejerk reaction like this occurs, it will make us foreigners look like complete pansies. As I commented on that article (see the link. Let's see if it passes moderation! **):

The cry for racism at every conceivable opportunity paints us increasingly as childish. Respect is earned by your actions, when one's notable actions consist primarily of such demands for respect, it to an extent undermines the other favourable attributes one might have.

Finally, A non-racism argument for you: If you had to employ someone, would you choose the one that was defensive when you accidentally laughed at a mistake on their CV, or the one who laughed with you?

In other words, if one's default position is to complain about racism in this way then it is closed minded: insofar as having a default position is closed minded. The open-minded stance is to try and understand the person stood opposite you, and work on what we have in common. You can have virtues such as justice, but equally when your sense of justice is causing you pain, is this indicative of injustice, or of a flaw in your sense of justice? Since laws change between countries, we can assume that justice (to some extent) is different between people. I'll leave that as a thought exercise for the reader ***.

Anyway, foreigners say worse things about themselves, and being big-nosed and blonde-haired actually puts you at the nice end of Japanese racism which is actually probably more fun than living in Japan as a Japanese (but I evidently have little experience in that area).

Finally, and more seriously, there are far, far worse aspects of Japanese media**** we could be picking on, like the biassed reporting of the war, or appeasement of far-right stances.


*For those too lazy to click the link (or if it dies), Mr Hayes reminds us that in Japan, blonde hair and a big nose aren't traits that are looked down upon. I would add that I'm not so sure when it comes to nose size... I never heard of a Japanese person getting a nose-job to look more Western.. But blonde hair is something commonly praised over here.

**To be honest, given the awful puntuation, I've half a mind to ask they delete it anyway, haw haw haw

*** all 2 of them, lol, though I think they are both clever enough to work out where I was going with this

****e.g. the insistence on popularising the band AKB48, even though everyone knows it causes bleeding in the ears of humans and other intelligent animals.

Aedict3 Slow and steady wins the race

A while back I posted about the glaring deficiencies between the paid-for Aedict3 and the freely available Aedict 2.

This week, Aedict 3 was updated and with it, so far as I can see, all of the features from aedict 2.

Its reassuring that the author is still working on the project, and I feel that my meagre investment in buying the paid-for version is starting to go the distance. That said, I'd still say that aedict3 has done little more than catch up with its predecessor. There are some nice changes, but these are entirely cosmetic so far as I can see. Nonetheless, it feels like there is momentum in the project, and perhaps aedict3 will soon surpass version 2.

The bottom line at the moment is that I still recommend version 2 if you're starting to seriously read in Japanese.

EDIT: Aedict 3 has finally overtaken it's older sibling, and I think people should now start seriously considering getting hold of it, especially if they read a lot of Japanese on their device see this blog post

Visiting the Yasukuni Shrine

To set a point straight: In my opinion, the Yushukan museum (the propaganda zoo situated next to the Yasukuni shrine) is an atrocity all unto itself. True, the Japanese have their own side of the story of what happened during WW2, but the stuff in that museum is exactly what the propaganda of the day was saying "it's all for the benefit of Asia, freeing it from colonialism!"... Ridiculous. The idea that promising young people here in Japan are falling for the exact same propaganda that cost so many young lives just a few decades ago is sickening.

Anyway, lets continue. Recently, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited the controversial Yasukuni war shrine.

If I (or the state, for that matter) was to visit a war-grave in the UK, noone would think a thing of it, I think. Somewhere (I assume) there are graves for the people that gave the go-ahead for the bombing of various cities in Germany, Japan, and a whole host of other cities across Europe that were under axis control. I imagine people still visit the cemeteries housing those graves, and I never heard of anyone complaining about it.

Yasukuni is a bit more complicated because the war-criminals and soldiers are all at the same complex. I'm not sure about the exact layout of the shrine, but needless to say, if you want to pay your respects to your war-dead, you might have your prayers overheard by a war-criminal or two. Evidently, if you're the leader of a country surrounded by past victims of said war-criminals, this is going to cause problems.

However, is this really a problem with the Japanese side? Or is this as much to do with our failure to understand what is going through the Japanese heads?

Freedom of religion is something we of the West are supposed to be pretty big on (not a fan of religion myself, but lets not go there today), and to tell anyone they cant worship somewhere because of events come and gone is supposedly amoral. But religion is just an obfuscation of what is really happening. The real reason Yasukuni has become such a controversy is because it has become a political tool. If the Japanese don't visit the shrine, domestically speaking they might look cowardly, and the government will weaken as a result. If they do visit the shrine, the surrounding countries will look cowardly if they don't protest. Its a horrible balancing act between Japanese public opinion and international politics, with religion acting as a pivot. If everyone just stood back and acknowledged the situation, and then moved on to the next issue, then the problem would disappear entirely. Unfortunately world politics always plays out like school-ground arguments.

Looking at the Japanese newspapers, it doesn't seem this latest visit the shrine went down too well on the Japanese side either, and perhaps this is a sign that visiting the shrine is no longer a viable way of increasing opinion poll ratings. If that is the case, then visits to the shrine by state officials might die off.

EDIT: Lets ignore the fact that Shinzo Abe is a Right-winger for the purposes of this discussion. It undoubtedly played a part in this, lets not kid ourselves that it wasn't desire for political support that really made him go, but his ideology. That isn't how most democracy works*.

EDIT2: Lets also ignore Shinzo Abe's possible ambition of nullifying the peace consitution. That is speculation, interesting and well-informed speculation, and possibly true. But for him to ever succeed he needs to come out of this affair with better public opinion than when he went in, which frankly doesn't look so certain.

*I say this with some considerable degree of hesitation.. Would love to discuss that with a politics graduate.

Aedict 3: big on version numbers, lean on features

So, as I stated previously, here, new versions of aedict are now paid-for. Now the big question, was it worth £3.50 to get it?

For the impatient, the answer is no. For any readers I haven't lost by now (that's assuming anyone even made it as far as "no"), I will elaborate. Aedict3, while being flashier and maybe even easier to navigate, is decidedly less functional than the free version. There are no more "advanced" options; you cannot restrict your search to "starts with", "ends with", or "exact match". To me, this is a big setback: if you're reading through a book and there is a word you've never seen before, there is still a very good chance you'll know what either the starting or the ending character is, and not being able to search on that basis is going to make reading books somewhat more arduous.

Additionally, the search is as accurate as before, typing 問 as a search term brings up words like 受け止める, even though the latter does not contain the former. I'm not sure whether that is an error of aedict or with the dictionary file itself, but either way it doesn't lend itself to quickly finding out what a word is, or to finding out about related words/phrases.

So, as suggested in the title, aedict 3 is a significant step backwards. But I'm not terribly worried about this, and I said before, I owe the author at least a beer for his previous efforts, the quality (or lack thereof) of aedict 3 wasn't a factor in my purchase.

I hope that future versions of aedict 3 will become as feature-rich as the freely available aedict 2, and while I wouldn't recommend it just now, I would say it could be worth signing onto aedict's google group, and keeping an eye on it.

EDIT: Aedict3 has continued to improve over the months following this blog article, and I'm quite happy to endorse it fully now. See this post.