JDIC
The following is summary information about JDIC. For a
complete description, see the
jdic26.doc
(72k) file.
JDIC is a freeware electronic Japanese-English
dictionary program which operates under MS-DOS on PCs.
The program has been written by Jim Breen
(jwb@csse.monash.edu.au).
JDIC functions as:
- a Japanese-English Dictionary (waei jiten), searching for
and displaying entries for keywords or phrases entered in Japanese
(hiragana or katakana);
- an English-Japanese Dictionary (eiwa jiten), searching for and
displaying entries for key-words entered in English;
- a Japanese-English Character Dictionary (kanei jiten),
capable of selecting kanji by a wide variety of techniques, such
as radical, stroke count, Nelson Index number, Halpern Index number,
SKIP code, Four Corner code or reading, and displaying information
about the kanji, and then, optionally, compounds containing that
kanji.
JDIC depends for its performance on a pair of
dictionary files; a Japanese/English dictionary and a Kanji
dictionary. Usually associated with JDIC is the EDICT
dictionary, of which the author coordinated the compilation, and
a packed kanji dictionary derived from the KANJIDIC file, also
compiled by the author.
JDIC is a fully self-contained dictionary package,
requiring no special software or hardware.
While JDIC is not aligned with any particular printed
dictionary, it draws upon index fields in KANJIDIC to provide a
search service which complements two major dictionaries:
- the "Japanese-English Character Dictionary", compiled by
Andrew N. Nelson and published by Tuttle.
- the "New Japanese-English Character Dictionary" compiled by Jack
Halpern and published by both Kenkyuusha and NTC.
In addition to the dictionaries mentioned above, several other
dictionary files have been compiled in a suitable format for use by
JDIC, either as the primary dictionary file, or using the
"alternative dictionary" facility feature of JDIC. Among
these are the LIFSCDIC bio-medical dictionary file and the JDDICT
Japanese/German dictionary file.
All the Japanese displayed by JDIC is in kana and kanji,
so if you cannot read at least hiragana and katakana, this is
not the program for you. The author has no intention whatsover of
producing a version using romanized Japanese.
A companion program to JDIC is JREADER, a text file
reader with the capability of looking up words and phrases in the
dictionary. JREADER also has additional features, including the
ability to detect verbs and adjectives in their inflected forms, and
to perform matches against the dictionary form.
JDIC is available from a number of ftp archive sites around the
world. The master site is Monash University's ftp.monash.edu.au:pub/nihongo/00INDEX.html
archive, where it is in the jdic26.zip archive.
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