Metrolingua (m j klein’s fine language blog) has an entry on Saikam,
which is “the first online Thai-Japanese/Japanese-Thai dictionary development project initiated by The Association of Thai Professionals in Japan (ATPIJ) and became a research project at the National Institute of Informatics (NII) in 1999. Saikam has a unique feature which allows both users and developers to access the database across the Internet. Dictionary data can be accessed and updated at the same time.”
But wait, there’s something there for us non-Thai speakers: a kanji dictionary. And get this–you don’t have to type in hiragana to get the kanji; you can type in the romaji reading for a character, the stroke count, and frequency, and it will give you a selection of corresponding kanji! And it will also give you compounds. This is really helpful if you need to look up something but don’t have the ability to type out hiragana (as seems to be the case on PC’s)…
It seems like they’re hoping to have both English and Thai translations of the compounds, so if you want to provide English translations and have time to kill, you can contact the admins of the site.
A nice find.
I just found this: Bisqwit’s Japanese language related tools – list
Lots of interesting Japanese-related tools there. (The SKIP interface looks curiously similar to the one that you link.)
That’s true in that both are trying to circumvent the need for users to recognise or stroke-count radicals. The “Easy, Advanced, Hard, Name, All” and “by frequency” bit is an interesting approach… I would have thought that by the time you knew whether a kanji was “advanced” or “hard” and its relative frequency, you wouldn’t really need to look it up any more.
Also, did you notice from the ABOUT page that the site uses EDICT and KANJIDICT as its backend? (For that part of the dictionary, anyway!) Yet another thing to thank Jim Breen for…
That Bisquit site is cool–and I can’t believe he’s Finnish, and he’s done all that in English. A bookmark-worthy site.
The Finns seem to have learned English en masse since I was there in ’71, when nobody knew it; everybody knew Russian, but nobody wanted to speak it, so the only guy I could chat with was the caretaker of the Russian Orthodox cathedral.
To language hat: You write about Finns in 1971: “everybody knew Russian…”
This is totally untrue. Only a small fraction
knew Russian. The percentage of pupils learning
any Russian at school must have below 10%. And
they all wanted to use it. I wonder how you have
come up with this kind of misinformed view.
Aarno
I would think it was obvious I was not making an informed sociological-historical statement but giving my impressions as a college student arriving for the first time in a country I wasn’t familiar with. My impression was that people seemed to know Russian but didn’t want to speak it. Obviously you’re better informed. Sorry to have offended you.
Thank you for the clarification. I’m sorry for being excessively critical. It is just that I happened to be a grammar school student at that time and choosing languages was somewhat important. One had to choose a primary and a secondary foreign language. The choice for the
primary one was between English and German. It was very rare to (be able to) choose the latter.
So 95% (I believe) had English. For the secondary
foreign language, students could choose German,
French, Russian, English… Some students actually
chose to study Russian at that time and it was
sometimes politically motivated, sometimes just
pure interest.