Rikai.com is my daddy

As an editor/light-translator, one indispensable tool for me is rikai.com

I was first turned on to this page in 2002 when I was working in Cambodia. One of the Khmer guys in my office had studied at International University of Japan in Niigata. He’d been asked to translate a Japanese email our organization had received. Since he’d only been in Japan for a year and didn’t seem to fluent, not to mention the school’s courses being taught in English, I was surprised he had the ability to get through all those kanji.

But he showed me this wonderful site, and I’ve used it ever since. Rikai isn’t going to be so much of use for a total beginner because you’ll need to be able to read hiragana and katakana too, but anyone past that level will appreciate that it doesn’t give you a whimsical and nonsensical translation, but merely tells you how to read the kanji.

The premise is simple; either drop in some text in the input box or enter a link. Kanji on the next page, be it the text in a box or a Japanese page, can then be moused-over and kanji readings will pop-up. Couldn’t be easier really. It doesn’t do the work for you because you still have to understand the grammatical structure of the sentence, your brain is still very involved; but it does tell how the kanji is read (onyomi and kunyomi) along with its meaning.

Firefox users can also download the Rikai-chan plug-in to make this feature active via the toolbar.

Can’t recommend Rikai enough and I’m very open to suggestions for other such sites that can raise my productivity.