New Japanese Dictionaries For Zbedic, Download them and try them out Options

[koan]

I have converted EDICT to bedic format so that it can be used with zbedic. The Nihongo-philes among you will probably say "that's not new". It's true, other people have converted EDICT before me and they have been satisfactory until now but for several reasons I thought I could improve upon those conversions. Mine are new because:

1. I'm using a newer version of EDICT. The last ja-en dictionary on the zbedic page was several years old and EDICT is updated regularly. They even released a new version today so already my conversion is old! I convert using a script so I can easily download it again and re-run the conversion process.
2. I added a version where the keywords are kana. I don't know about you, but I don't know all the kanji yet. I also made sure the kana is included in the pronunciation of the kanji keyword version.
3. My scripts mark up all the information such as part of speech or category and don't miss it out. I deal with duplicated entries properly (which are otherwise lost).
4. Unfortunately (in the sense of fair play) I have to recommend you de-install the previous conversions by other people as they do not acknowledge EDICT properly as required by it's distribution licence.

I don't know how the previously available en-ja dictionary was created; it looks like it could have been made manually due to the strange formatting and it only covers about 50% of the entries in EDICT. However, it is created by reverse look up (like my version) which is decidedly dodgy. I've tried to make up some sensible rules to group together entries that should be listed together, like "run" with "to run", "good" with "to be good" etc etc.

I'm using Japanese every day so as time passes I hope to improve the conversion (particularly en-ja) as experience prompts me to make improvements.

You can find the new files and some details here.
Screenshots: ja-en Kanji, ja-en Kana, en-ja.

I have a Shepherd with 1 GB SD card so I just slip these files (~3 MB each) onto the SD card, no problems.

Regarding the aforementioned duplicated entries problem, bedic also has a problem with repeated headwords. I will be making my scripts to fix such problems available shortly, in the hope to encourage other people to put together useful dictionaries and glossaries.

Comments welcome!

[kurochka]

Thank you, Koan!!!

I am studying Japanese on and off. I've got a good a good EPWING ja-en dictionary but I am having a problem with en-ja since the pricy EPWING dictionaries do not include kana.

I looked at the previous EDICT versions and was not satisfied. I'll check out yours.

Will you open your conversion script?

What sort of problem with headwords are you referring to? Lots of dictionary software does not allow two or more same headwords to be used. In zbedic, headwords could turn to be "same" in many instances where some chars are in ignore-char list.

I also wish that zbedic would support ~ in the text of the translation (by substituting the ~ with the headword). This way the size of the dictionaries could be reduced further.