WinEngJa is a Japanese-English dictionary program for Windows. 

Download here.   Github for it is here.

It monitors the clipboard, automatically searches on clipboard change, is fast, is always on top, and is something I've found helpful enough to use every single day for the past 3 months. I got so used to using it in fact that I didn't realize how much it might help other people until I was sharing my screen with a friend on Skype who is also learning Japanese. He asked me what the funny little box was that produced definitions, almost by magic, whenever I needed them. I explained what it was, and he wanted me to send it to him. So instead of just sending it to him I decided to do release it to everyone. 

Here's how this project came to be. About 6 months ago I built myself a new computer to play Starcraft 2, and after recovering from my 90 day Starcraft-induced stupor I realized I could use the machine for more than a single game. I decided to start using it instead of my Macbook Pro to translate subtitles in Aegisub because Aegisub on the Mac is, kind of, garbagey. It was at that point that I realized one of the most indispensible tools in my toolkit for understanding Japanese on my computer, JEDict, doesn't exist on Windows. So...I decided to write my own. 

It's extremely simple, but it's also extremely handy. The way I use it every day while studying is that I have the WinEngJa window up next to my flashcard window, and if I don't understand something then I copy it to the clipboard. WinEngJa looks it up, and I go on my merry way. I also use it while reading Japanese news articles. 

Now some of you might say here, "But John, why don't you just use something like RikaiChan?" The reason I don't use RikaiChan is right in the name of the tool. "Rikai," basically means "understanding." That's all well and good, but I want something that's going to help me learn rather than immediately understand. RikaiChan makes looking up words too easy, and when I used it in the past I found myself just slowly mousing over every single word in a news story without really ever looking at the underlying Japanese. RikaiChan is great if you want to make it through reams of Japanese text for a class or something, but it isn't good if you want to learn. You can easily convince yourself that you know more than you really know when you use RikaiChan, and I find that scary as someone who would eventually like to improve enough to stop using tools like RikaiChan.

That's why I prefer something like JEDict or my tool. Dictionary lookups are easy, but they're not omnipresent. I can look something up fairly painlessly when I want to, but not when I don't want to. That kind of thing is important to me, and it's why I found it necessary to write a program like this for Windows.

The first version of this tool was written in Python, but I ran into weird madness really quickly involving a bug to do with hooking the clipboard. I could hook and monitor the clipboard just fine using Python on Windows, but then actually modifying any UI element to say, ya know, display the clipboard data just made Python crash. So I rewrote it in .NET, and it's working splendidly despite my having never touched .NET before. The whole process only took about 3-4 hours to reproduce what I had done in Python because the original program relied on SQLite. The database code wasn't portable obviously, but the database itself was. A lot of my early work on the first version of the program was adapting the JMDict data to something I could use. It's open source because in the event that I am a lazy jerk that never fixes any of the bugs maybe someone who is an actual real programmer will fix it.

I've locked comments on this to prevent the spammers from taking over and because ideally I'd like to manage this thing through Github. If you find an issue or bug then please file it on the GitHub.

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