I've been looking forward to reading the books I bought during my trip to japan, but of course they are way too difficult for me. It might not be the best idea altogether to start reading them (things like Murakami) already (I know little more than 250 kanji), but just in case when I start doing so I wanted to have a tool for my phone that I could use to scan and recognize kanji and maybe words I don't know. That would be a lot faster than looking up kanji by selecting radicals.
The Google Translate app seems to be doing the recognition just fine, however the annoying thing is, it only gives english translations. To get the japanese pronounciation one needs to navigate a bit, which I find extremely annoying. Are there any comparable tools for smartphones that give more detailed information about individual words uppon scanning them, maybe showing dictionary entries, rather than trying to translate whole sentences into english, which invariably fails miserably anyway? I'm sure someone must have developed a tool like that. Are there any free ones? I'm very much looking forward to your advice and thank you all in advance.
Hello! I, too, was looking for that kind of application when I get a hand of a Japanese book, and as far from I know, there's KanjiTomo that can immediately recognize kanji in form of picture and show the definition
But if you had problem like me (somehow KanjiTomo doesn't work on my laptop), I suggest to use two app to help you on your problem: One is to turn image kanji into text kanji and the other is reading help such as Yomichan or Rikaichan website (http://www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl) that you can paste the text and click go
The workflow will works like these:
Scan the image and turn the kanji into text → copy the text → open reading help → paste the text and read
It may be a bit hassle but that's the solution I came up so far. If anyone know a better way, please contribute!
