Some Useful Tools to Help Read Manga/Books in Japanese

[Nosebleed]

So we all know there's multiple ways to help us read Japanese VNs by now. All Japanese VNs have text you can grab and display, which makes them an easy target for practicing reading. There's one downside though, visual novels are typically incredibly long, especially if you are a beginner (yes, even the shorter ones can take a while to read if you're inexperienced). I always thought this downside affected lots of people that wanted to practice reading but didn't have the time/energy to read through an entire VN in Japanese to start with.

However, other mediums like manga and LNs are much more difficult due to requiring you to either constantly look at a dictionary or just know all those kanji from memory (with the exception of manga that have furigana, but those are usually aimed at younger audiences and might not be the most interesting). It felt unfair that such fun media couldn't be used as easily to study Japanese.

Well luckily yesterday I was talking to a friend on discord and fanboying over the Monogatari Series with them and they ended up showing me a few tools they used to read LNs, and after that I myself looked up for ways to read manga in Japanese, and thus we come to this thread in which I'm hoping to share something useful with those of you who wish to read these mediums as a way to practice Japanese.

Note: If you know any other/better software, please by all means share it!

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Kanjitomo

Kanjitomo is an incredibly useful software to read manga on your computer. It detects kanji/words by simply hovering over them with your mouse. But not only that, it gives you the reading/meaning of those words/kanji. And lastly, if it fails to show the correct kanji, it shows you a list with similar looking kanji for you to browse, it also lets you edit the individual kanji contained in the word in case it guessed the 2nd or 3rd characters wrong, thus always letting you pick which is the right one.

Some screenshots: 

Advantages:

• Easy word lookup
• Very customizeable
• Let's you actually import images and scroll through multiple images in a single folder.
• Also supports Chinese

Disadvantages

• Can get laggy sometimes (mostly on startup)
• The zoom feature can get somewhat annoying to control
• Although it lets you import files, I found the file viewer annoying to use and prefer to just use some other software to open the images

Download (requires Java to be installed): http://kanjitomo.net/

JGloss

This software is primarily geared towards books. What it does is it lets you import .txt files (or copy text) and open them in the reader. After that it places furigana on top of all the words, and also creates a glossary of words on the right for you to look up if you need. One feature I really appreciated in it was that it only displays furigana for the first instance of a word only, forcing you to memorize the word after that (although if you want to, you can select the word and it'll look it up for you regardless).

Now you might be thinking, doesn't Translation Aggregator also do something similar? While TA does indeed have these same functions, TA is mostly practical for smaller chunks of text, not whole sections of a book.

Screenshots:

With translation enabled:

Advantages:

• Easy way to read large chunks of text with furigana
• Can use different parsers.
• Can also place the English translation underneath the words if needed
• Creates a glossary of words for an easy lookup
• Pretty costumizeable interface (you can change the font/size/colors/etc.)
• Also works with German

Disadvantages:

• Requires you to copy the text or have a text file of the book you're reading, which doesn't always happen.
• Parsing is not perfect and you may find some weird results at times (but that's the same for any Japanese parser).
• It seems to have a certain limit of text it can display (I kept running into an error when I imported a lot of text), so you may not be able to import whole books but instead have to copy multiple chunks (they're pretty big chunks though)

Download: http://jgloss.sourceforge.net/

Yomichan

Yomichan is an Anki add-on that lets you read text and look up words while simultaneously being able to create an anki deck for the words you want. This tool is incredibly useful if you want to study and read a book at the same time.

Screenshot:

Advantages:

• Lets you read entire books at once (you can also copy the text)
• Very easy to create an anki deck with the words from the text

Disadvantages

• No furigana on the text itself 
• Requires you to have the book in a .txt file
• More useful for studying than actually reading

Download (requires anki to be installed): https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/934748696

Capture2Text

Capture2Text is a simple but intuitive OCR (Optic Character Recognition) program that lets you select a part of your screen to convert into text. It's useful to grab whole sentences from a specific bubble of text or a sentence from a book and automatically copy them to your clipboard, which you can then use to do whatever. If you're a translator, it makes the script writing process much easier since you don't have to manually input everything.

(I don't really have any screenshots since all the software does is grab and copy text.)

Advantages:

• Easy way to grab text from an image and paste it onto your clipboard (or someplace else)
• Works well in conjunction with other software like TA.

Disatvantages:

• The recognition can fail pretty hard depending on the font used (you can easily end up with scrambled jibberish)

Download: http://capture2text.sourceforge.net/

 

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I know it's not groundbreaking and it might not even be as appealing as just grabbing text in a VN, but I find manga and LNs very fun and less tiresome to read and so these tools come in really handy for that purpose.

Think of it this way, do you want to start practicing Japanese by reading an entire visual novel with more than a thousand lines from the get go, or would something smaller like a 20 page manga chapter be a little easier for starters? Of course, this doesn't mean you shouldn't try to read visual novels, they're great practice, but I think a lot of people lose themselves when starting off with them and perhaps these tools will help keep the focus on studying and memorizing things a bit more instead of just reading.

[Bolverk]

Nice tools.

Additionally another OCR software Capture2Text Is nice as well. I find myself using kanjitomo mostly, and Capture2Text when kanjitomo fails. kanjitomo is much faster and just hover over, Capture2Text is manual but better at recognizing the text.

I mainly read from e-book/txt format. So I convert the books to html files so I can read them in the browser. I like this personally because then I can use rikisama. Which supports Epwing dictionaries. I use 2 methods convert the files to html.

If it's txt format (Aozora, 青空文庫) . I use JNovel Formatter

If it's in Ebook format epub/aw3 etc I use convert function included in the software Calibre. Convert it from the native format to Zip (zipped up html files). You can change the formatting of the html pages by editing the calibre Css files in the folder. Change font, size etc. I do that because I find the formatting rather odd.

Incidentally, drm files are like tsundere waifus. You gotto handle them with care first in another way. 

[Nosebleed]

1 minute ago, Bolverk said:

Nice tools.

Additionally another OCR software Capture2Text Is nice as well.

I was initially going to include this as well, but sadly my experience with it has mostly been negative as it constantly gets the text wrong. I wonder if it's my settings or something.

Never thought about converting .txt files to html and read them in-browser, I'm gonna give it a try when I can.

[Bolverk]

5 minutes ago, Nosebleed said:

I was initially going to include this as well, but sadly my experience with it has mostly been negative as it constantly gets the text wrong. I wonder if it's my settings or something.

Never thought about converting .txt files to html and read them in-browser, I'm gonna give it a try when I can.

Perhaps you've had bad luck with it. Although you have to change a few settings with it. Without that it really doesn't work that well. Like Changing the "OCR langauge" to Japanesse, having the "text direction" to what you are reading, either vertical or horizontal.

[Nosebleed]

8 minutes ago, Bolverk said:

Perhaps you've had bad luck with it. Although you have to change a few settings with it. Without that it really doesn't work that well. Like Changing the "OCR langauge" to Japanesse, having the "text direction" to what you are reading, either vertical or horizontal.

Yeah I changed the language and the orientation, but it still just comes up with crazy stuff and I'm not sure why. I'm also using pretty clear text. I think it might have to do with fonts.

Example:

Turned into "赦伽憾囁珈帽嗚をでした"

But

Turned out fine.

[Bolverk]

Ah, yes. I get the same issue with the top one. It's no doubt due to the fonts I think as well.

I've only used the software on fonts like the one on the bottom. So I've never actually experienced this problem. Good to know.

[Dergonu]

Damn, I had no idea this was even a thing. This does make looking up kanji when viewing a pdf or a picture file a lot easier. Will probably also be really helpful for beginners who don't want to go straight into a VN, like you said.

Thanks for making this guide!

(Tbh, seeing as there isn't really anything on this type of tool on the forum, you should sticky this.)

[Nosebleed]

I decided to add Capture2Text because even if it doesn't always work, it's still a useful tool.

Rikaisama seems pretty useful but forcing myself to switch browsers is too much.
It'd be nice if Rikaisama wasn't just an extension but a standalone piece of software. Oh well.

[tymmur]

1 minute ago, Nosebleed said:

I decided to add Capture2Text because even if it doesn't always works, it's still a useful tool.

I have had decent luck with it. Also a tool can be useful even if it doesn't always work. You can see if it read correctly, meaning you know when to ditch the result. If it fails, try again. Usually accuracy goes up as the number of characters goes down. If it misses a kanji, try to read that one alone and it has a much better chance of working.

 

The part about being able to verify if it read the text correctly is quite essential. The biggest issue I see in machine translations is that while they might work, you don't know unless you compare with a human translation and if you have that, you wouldn't need a machine translation (the word useless comes to mind right now). With Capture2Text or any other OCR tool, you can verify if it got it right even if you can't figure out how to type the kanji yourself, meaning when it gets it right, you know you can trust the result 100%.

[Nosebleed]

15 minutes ago, tymmur said:

I have had decent luck with it. Also a tool can be useful even if it doesn't always work. You can see if it read correctly, meaning you know when to ditch the result. If it fails, try again. Usually accuracy goes up as the number of characters goes down. If it misses a kanji, try to read that one alone and it has a much better chance of working.

 

The part about being able to verify if it read the text correctly is quite essential. The biggest issue I see in machine translations is that while they might work, you don't know unless you compare with a human translation and if you have that, you wouldn't need a machine translation (the word useless comes to mind right now). With Capture2Text or any other OCR tool, you can verify if it got it right even if you can't figure out how to type the kanji yourself, meaning when it gets it right, you know you can trust the result 100%.

Yeah I know you can easily fix a lot of it. I'm just saying, from a practical standpoint it could be annoying if you have a font that the program can barely recognize. It really depends on the material you're working with.

Also, for beginners in particular, it can be difficult to correct the sentences since they don't even know the kanji. Imagine you're trying to translate a word but the software just won't recognize it. It can get annoying. I would say it would be useful in conjunction with kanjitomo, because by itself it can be frustrating.

[Forte]

A question. Does this Kanjitomo works well when trying to recognize some kanji of any anime?

[Riku]

Personally, I use TA coupled with Translation Assistant to read Web Novels. That way I just need to copy the entire chapter and paste it on a new file :

I recommand the "One Sentence per Line" option to have better parsing. Then thanks to translation assistant, it keeps one sentence at time in the clipboard, and you just need to go to the next one :

Tried JGloss, but I prefer TA.

I wonder if someone knows what WN I used for the example?

 

[Bolverk]

Nice @Riku I tried looking for something that could show one line at a time in TA but I couldn't find anything. Really nice. Going to be fun trying this out.

I can't get the 3.0 version to work, but the 2.4.1 version works. So doesn't really matter though. The 3.0 functions aren't really needed for me.

[Nosebleed]

That's a really neat way to use TA @Riku, I didn't even know software like that existed. The sole reason I wouldn't use TA before for this is because there's no way it could handle such large amounts of text in it (and if it did, it'd probably look super messy).

Definitely going to try out this method tomorrow.

[Riku]

Glad you like it. I didn't know that someone took the project over, so I'm still using the v1.0, but it's enough to just use the automatic clipboard function.

[mspykez]

This is a start, but I'm looking for something that allows me to load an entire RAW chapter of manga (multiple image files) from my local disk into it and then proceeds to translate the entire thing into english. In addition to that it would be cool if it also totally replaced the japanese text with the translated text inside the image itself allowing me then to save all the translated images to my disk.

I hope to find a process that will do all this automatically for me. I know that machine translation is not perfect but it's better than nothing.

Any ideas?

 

ps. I found this extension here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/anity/dlifbagcoiffpplfbdmcgmfmcfbjpipb?hl=en it's basically what I want except you can't 'load' multiple images into it at the same time plus it appears you are also not able to save the translated image to your computer.

[mspykez]

On 2/5/2021 at 7:21 AM, mspykez said:

ps. I found this extension here https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/anity/dlifbagcoiffpplfbdmcgmfmcfbjpipb?hl=en it's basically what I want except you can't 'load' multiple images into it at the same time plus it appears you are also not able to save the translated image to your computer.

found this newer extension called Raw Manga Fan that gives way better results than the one previously mentioned. Really recommend this one instead!

First images that you try to translate take a few seconds longer but after that it seems images get translated faster and faster.