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!

[koan]

I just made an update to these dictionary files, you can find them on my website at the usual place.

I updated my conversion scripts to handle some new parts of speech and categories
in EDICT. I also wrote a mega script that downloads EDICT, decompresses it,
converts the coding, calls all 3 conversion scripts, runs my other scripts to fix
duplications and broken headwords and finally converts from simple bedic
to final bedic output.

This is version 1.3; the last version was almost 2 years ago so there are many
thousands of new entries. It's definitely worth updating.