The Japanese language has three different alphabets:
Kanji: Ideographic alphabet of Chinese origin. Every character represents an idea or concept.
Hiragana: Phonetic alphabet used mostly in combination with kanji.
Katakana: Phonetic alphabet used to represent foreign words, places, onomatopoeias, etc.
If the word is represented in kanji, the reading section shows how this word is read.
Words having multiple readings will be ordered by popularity.
Furigana
Furigana are the smaller kana characters, printed over the kanji to indicate their pronunciation. If the word has one or more kanji characters, its furigana will be written on top of them.
The transliteration can also contain the pitch accent representation for the pronunciation of this word. In some cases, the same word may have different pitch accents, and sometimes the pitch accent depends on the part of speech of the word. If that's the case, it will be represented beside it.
Audio
Words indicated by the symbol have computer-generated audio that can be listened to by clicking on it.
Translation of the selected word to several languages.
Different meanings
A word can have one or different meanings. For each meaning, one or more equivalents of the Japanese word will be presented in English or other languages.
In the case of having multiple meanings, they will be ordered by popularity.
Tags
Some translations may have tags associated giving miscellaneous information:
Part-of-speech information
Information about the field of application
Information about the source language if it's a loan word
If the meaning is associated with a specific dialect
References
There may also be links to similar, related or antonym words.
Other languages
English is the main language for the translations, but some words will also be available in other languages: Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, or Swedish.
The quality of these translations may vary. In case of discrepancies the English translation will prevail.
There are some generic rules to write kanji properly, specifying the order on which each stroke should be written, and although there are some exceptions, these rules apply most of the time.
This section represents in a visual way the stroke order of each kanji that composes the word. The animation can be stopped, at any time and each step can be manually advanced.
Controls
Icon
Description
Reset the animation
Move one stroke backwards
Play animation
Move one stroke forward
Show stroke order
If checked, shows a number besides each stroke representing the order on which it should be written
The Japanese sentence, the sentence analysis, and the English translation are always included. Using the sentence analysis is possible to learn how the sentence is constructed and every single word can be examined one by one.
In some cases translation to other languages can also be included. The quality of the translations may vary, and it's included for reference only.
It's also possible to hear a computer generated transcription of the Japanese sentence by clicking the speaker icon
Warning about the quality of the sentences
All the sentences are imported from the Tatoeba project, a collaborative database of sentences and translations maintained by thousands of members. Also, most of the Japanese sentences were imported from the Tanaka Corpus. These were created by students as part of a project and in some cases they were not supervised by a teacher. That's the reason why the quality of the sentences may be inconsistent, and they may not sound natural sometimes.
Although there are many good examples too, as a general rule, as a general guide don't trust too much in the quality of the sentence.
If you have enough knowledge and want to improve the quality of an example, I encourage you to click on the open in tatoeba link and register to Tatoeba to update it.
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Image Sapporo Snow Festival (Sapporo Yuki Matsuri): By JapanDict, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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