Development of a reading application for Japanese

THIS IS NOT AN AD

Hello,

Let me introduce myself. My name is Vadim, I currently live in Tokyo and I'm university student. Soon, hopefully, I will graduate. The project that I've been working on is a simple Japanese text reading application, very similar to Rikaichan and its alternatives. It is a prototype that can work only with plain texts (cannot upload manga and such). For better reading experience, it shows assistance in a form of pictures, kanji combinations and translations. One thing that we also plan to add in the future is extraction of text from manga scans. We already have an experimental application which shows some results. But still a lot of research is required.

Anyway, I need your help to evaluate this application! If any of you will have some free time, I would REALLY appreciate if you try out the app and submit your feedback through the form on the website (link below). Any suggestion or criticism will be highly appreciated! The app is a bit buggy and sometimes really slow (because of my crappy code and crappy server). But please keep in mind that aim of this project on its current stage is to prove that the conceptual features that we have implemented are useful.

You can access the app through the following URL: Japanese Reading Tutor
Please don't forget to submit your feedback if you choose to help us! Your feedback will decide if we will keep working on this project, or drop it.

Thank you for your attention.
Vadim

KanjiTomo is another application similar to this, though unlike Rikaichan it works on anything on your screen rather than just websites; and it uses OCR so it also works on images. Its detection is consistently fast and doesn't require copy-pasting the text. In addition, it supports vertical text and is prepared for the case where the OCR didn't detect a perfect match (because a kanji is in a stylized font/handwritten, or printed in a small size): in this case it gives a list of possible characters so you can manually pick the one that matches.

On the other hand, it's purely a dictionary application - it doesn't have kanji decompositions or pictures that help you remember a word.