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(this page describes the current version; click here for info on the version prior to April 2008)
Eijiro is the "big dog" of Japanese-English dictionaries. It's actually a suite of dictionaries--the two main ones are Eijiro (yes, the same as the whole package), which currently has about 1.7 million English-to-Japanese entries, and Waeijiro, which has 1.9 million Japanese-to-English entries, but Eijiro also includes separate dictionaries of example sentences, abbreviations, and acronyms. It was made and continues to be updated by a society for professional translators; as such, it's especially rich in difficult and obscure terms, colloquial expressions, and technical terms. When a conversation reaches an impasse over a critical word or expression, the electronic dictionaries come out--it's common for me to quickly find it in Eijiro or Waeijiro, while my Japanese friends pounding away on their high-end Wordtanks and Ex-Words come up dry. Not only does Eijiro have a huge number of words and phrases, it also gives you a good bit of information about them, especially example sentences showing the meaning more precisely and how to use the word or expression grammatically.
Eijiro is a tremendous resource, but it was designed for Japanese users (for example, only a small number of Japanese words in the English-to-Japanese entries and NONE in the Japanese-to-English entries have yomigana showing you how to pronounce the word). For those of who are NOT native Japanese speakers, the JLT version of Eijiro is a huge improvement over the original. The biggest advantage: yomigana for almost every word. This, in turn, means two things.
The current JLT system consists of two dictionaries, Eijiro for English-to-Japanese lookups and Waeijiro for Japanese-to-English. The example sentences, abbreviations, and acronyms dictionaries have been folded into these for simplicity.
Here are a few screenshots--English-to-Japanese on the top (note the dictionary name "Eijiro" in the bar at the top of the screen) and Japanese-to-English on the bottom ("Waeijiro"). For an explanation of how the dictionary program itself works, please see the EBPocket page. Note the yomigana next to kanji-containing words and the example sentences
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And here's what you get when you look up a Japanese word (click any to see it in full VGA):
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You'll find the word whether you've written kana or kanji into the find box.
Note that I've sized the images here to appear about the same physical size as the Axim or iPAQ's screen (depending on your monitor, of course); however the actual PDA screen squeezes a full 480x640 pixels into that space, so it's much sharper and easier to read (more pixels in the same size=higher resolution). You can click each image to see the actual 480x640 pixels you'd get on the screen of an Axim or other VGA PDA, although because the image will then be much larger than on the Axim screen it still won't look quite as sharp as the real thing. And of course you can change the text size to be larger or smaller, too, which will also affect legibility (these shots are from the old version of Eijiro, without yomigana).
Basically, enter a word in the search window and tap Find (you can see that in the first part of the animation on the right, below). Pretty easy, huh? The key thing to remember is that English words are Eijiro and Japanese in Waeijiro--if you enter, say 惑星 or わくせい into Eijiro you won't find anything; ditto if you enter an English word into Waeijiro. See the general instructions for particulars on how to enter text and see the EBPocket page for particulars on using the software.
The JLT version adds one more feature that makes Eijiro dramatically more useful. In the Search Type pull-down menu to the right of the Find button at the top, you can choose Cross as a search type. You can enter one or more words, separated by spaces, in English or Japanese, and it'll find all entries with those words anywhere in the keyword. Trust me, however useful you think this sounds, it's even more useful. It's great when you're looking for a phrase and aren't sure exactly how to word it. It's great when you're trying to find an example sentence to show the grammar of how to use something. For example, recently I wanted to see what particle and word order to use in saying "compare A with B," so I did a cross search of "compare with" and found both a general entry explaining the grammar and a lot of more particular, real-life examples. You can enter "cat dog" to find out how to say "it's raining cats and dogs." You probably won't use it much at first as you get used to the dictionaries in general, then you'll try it out once in a while, and soon--especially as you advance in ability and your needs become more complex--you'll find yourself using cross search more and more often, in ways even I haven't thought of yet.
Eijiro is made for translators, so it assumes you already know basic vocabulary. Sometimes if you search for a fairly basic word, you won't find it--in that case, look in Edict. Sometimes, too, you'll look up a basic English word like "dog" and, because it assumes any Japanese who's gotten through junior high school knows that "dog" is "犬｛いぬ｝," it gives you more colloquial meanings instead of just the straight one. You can always spot this, because the definition will look too complicated for the simple term, and it'll be followed by a number of subsidiary phrases in which "dog" is translated as "犬｛いぬ｝." Hard to explain and it doesn't come up that often (and never anything but the simplest vocabulary), but when it does it's easy to spot. Having both dictionaries gives you just about every Japanese word you're ever likely to encounter.
The version of Eijiro described here is available ONLY from this site. It comes installed on the Complete System, as an option when purchasing a memory card, or as a download. The original version of Eijiro is sold as a download from the website of EDP, the group that made and continues to maintain it. The password costs 1980 yen--certainly the biggest bargain around. Here's a hint for getting through the online payment forms: use rikaichan on Firefox to show what to enter where. After paying, you'll be given a link to download the files. You'll get all the dictionaries in both PDIC format (for those of you using WDIC on a Palm OS PDA) and text format. You can find instructions elsewhere on my site as well as online for converting the text versions to different formats. The PDIC version from EDP has no yomigana whatesoever, and the text version (and any other version you build out of that) has yomigana for only a limited number of Japanese words in E-to-J entries only. If you want Eijiro with full yomigana, Japanese Language Tools is the only place you'll find it.
Because of all the work that's gone into Eijiro, because any piracy by customers traceable back to me could endanger my ability to offer Eijiro, and because I've seen my hard work stolen before, I put a unique identifying code into every copy I sell and I regularly check all the downloading sites. If one of my customers posts a copy of Eijiro to any file sharing site, I will be able to prove who bought that copy and I will turn that information over to Eijiro's copyright lawyers.
If I'm only paying 1980 yen for the license for the dictionary I'm selling you, why am I charging you so much more? Adding yomigana to almost all words everywhere in the dictionaries was a huge project. It took years of learning about how the software works and years of experience using regular expressions to edit massive databases and a few years of studying Japanese before I was even confident it was possible. Then it took hiring a professional programmer to write a custom program to do the massive computational task at the heart of the project (I found a genius, by the way--several others I consulted couldn't make it work, even after weeks of effort, and a couple came up with prgrams that worked but took days or weeks to run--contact me if you need a recommendation for a superb C programmer). It took months of preparing the data I needed to use as input for the program, and after running the program it took a month of solid effort making the result work as a dictionary--including a lot of trial and error and testing. It also took upgrading to an more powerful computer and buying some additional expensive editing software. Nothing is easy or cheap when you need to manhandle hundreds of thousands of pages worth of text (especially when half of that text is Japanese). Even at the current prices, I don't expect to ever break even on my time and investment in the Eijiro upgrade project. It is, however, paying off in satisfaction. I take a lot of pride in the system I've put together, and when I realized it was possible to make such a dramatic improvement in it, I couldn't pass it by. I have to charge a lot for my dictionary system--I want to do everything I can to make sure my customers feel happy that they spent the money.
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