Tagaini Jisho A free Japanese dictionary and study assistant

The first beta of Tagaini 0.2.5 is available at the beta section of the download page. The most noticeable new feature is the ability to organize items into sorted and hierarchical lists, a feature useful for people trying to read books or who like to organize their vocabulary/kanjis following the lessons of their Japanese manual.

A first version of the kanji component selector is also available in a very slow and buggy version - please don't worry about it too much. The user interface has also a been a little bit reorganized, both visually and from a source code perspective, in order to allow vertical space optimization.

Behind the stage, the database builders have been totally rewritten in C++ and any dependency on Python during compilation has been dropped, which fixes the problems many have been encountering when trying to compile from source. Thanks to the use of CMake, compilation should now be a breeze on any supported platform.

Users are encouraged to try this release and report their experience with it, but please keep in mind that the user database schema has been updated and that you won't be able to switch back to 0.2.4 after having started using this beta unless you restore your user database as it was before installation. Therefore, it is advised to export your user data (in the Program menu), so that you are able to import it back in case you need to return to 0.2.4.

Thanks to the great job by Neil Caldwell, Tagaini now has an up-to-date and extensive user manual, which will be integrated into future releases.

Neil did not stop there since he also turned the previous documentation into a quick start guide and also wrote an extensive installation manual with details about how to configure your system properly in order to enjoy Tagaini. Hopefully all these nice documents will be updated and further improved as new versions are released.

Thanks, Neil!

Even though I'm slow releasing new versions, I'll try to keep users more informed about what is going on. The following video is about the main feature of 0.2.5, that will almost be released for it. It is a new way of finding and inputing kanji that you don't know anything about, as long as you are able to identify one or several of its components.

The long-due 0.2.4 release of Tagaini Jisho is finally available. This release has been baked for months in order to provide much more polished preferences and tons of new features. Amongst them are full wildcard search support, automatic filtering of some entries according to their properties (e.g. obsolete words), hiragana/katakana agnostic search, training on a given results set, improvements in the kanji strokes rendering and navigation, support for SKIP code search, an improved score calculation algorithm, a Dutch translation of the GUI, and much more.

So, it's time for another beta release! Not many changes in this one (although the kanjis popup outline has been reworked because Qt 4.6 made it too buggy), but rather cleaning and improvement of the building and release process in order to make it more comfortable. As a result, this version is available and working on Windows, Mac and Linux again.

The score calculation algorithm has also been reworked - the previous one was totally flawed and only based on the number of attempts/number of success ratio. The new one takes the last time the entry has been reviewed into account in order to tune its score.

A Dutch translation of the GUI has also been submitted by Jeroen Hoek - many thanks to him.

There are still a couple of imperfections to fix and 0.2.4 will finally be released. Then it will be time to work on more interesting features.