Yomibaba

Background

This is a temporary fork of Yomichan with just one additional, but very useful, feature.

The feature added supports exporting and importing the entire IndexedDB database of dictionaries that have been imported by Yomichan. This lets you track only one file (or two, if you want to copy the same settings too) when you want to migrate between browsers and devices, or indeed when you just want to share your settings with newer people without giving them a mountain of drudgery to tackle first. Backups also become more manageable. It is also significantly faster to load all the data this way since it avoids all the parsing and validation that Yomichan typically does. Of course, that means the data could be invalid too but I haven’t run into problems yet after importing database that was actually properly exported.

I have renamed user-facing references to Yomibaba to respect the wishes of the developer of Yomichan to sunset the Yomichan name but I didn’t go the whole mile of renaming all the inner files and such because this is intended to be a stop-gap single release. See Yomitan for an actual longer-term project that follows in the spirit of Yomichan.

Yomitan project wishes to have a public release only after some major kinks have been ironed out but I think importing and exporting database is a useful enough feature to release something just for it hence why this exists.

While I was working on this, a stupidly annoying audio bug also popped up with Firefox and a fix is included in this release FWIW. Credits to Aquafina-water-bottle for the fix.

See Yomichan REAMDE for the documentation about everything yomichan other than this new feature. Also present in this repository as Yomichan_README.md.

Installation

Firefox

Download yomibaba-firefox-signed-22.11.3.6.xpi and drag it onto your Firefox window, or just double click it.

Chromium based browsers on a computer

• Download yomibaba-chrome.zip and unzip it somewhere
• Go to chrome://extensions/ and turn on developer mode from the top right
• Click Load unpacked and select the unzipped folder

Chromium based browsers on mobile (i.e., Kiwi)

• If you are on a mobile device and using a Chromium based browser like Kiwi, install using the yomibaba-chrome.crx file instead. Loading unpacked extensions with a zip apparently causes the Android cache cleanup to reap them occasionally. This hasn’t been tested with any other mobile browser fwiw so your mileage may vary.

Usage

Exporting the dictionary database from Yomichan

Existing Yomichan extension installations don’t have the code that lets you export the database. Which means that we have no choice but to inject and run the code on top of the extension somehow. I have instructions on how to do that in this repository: https://github.com/forsakeninfinity/yomichan-data-exporter#steps-to-export-the-data

If you are migrating from Yomichan like this, you should strongly consider also exporting your settings from the Backup section of Yomichan’s Settings page and importing those in Yomibaba so that you get your exact setup back.

Importing the dictionary database

• Go to Yomibaba’s settings page (Click on the extension’s icon then click on the cog icon from the popup).
• Click Import Dictionary Data and select the database file you want to import
• Wait for the import to finish then turn all the dictionaries back on from the Dictionaries > Configure installed and enabled dictionaries section
• Refresh the browser tab to see the dictionaries in effect
• Restart the browser if you keep running into issues

Exporting the database from Yomibaba

• Just click Export Dictionary Data from the backup section of Yomibaba’s settings page
• It will show you a progress report as it exports the data then initiates a download for a file named something like yomibaba-dictionaries-YYYY-MM-DD-HH-mm-ss.json (e.g. yomibaba-dictionaries-2023-07-05-02-42-04.json)

Consider compressing the data for sharing and archival

Note that the exported file is going to be rather large (likely a few gigabytes, depending on the size of your collection). You should consider compressing it if you are sharing (or archiving) the data over the internet. For example, I get 10x+ compression without loss for the beginner database I share further below which could matter a lot for people with slow (or bandwidth-limited) internet.

You can run the following command on a POSIX shell (if you are on windows, I strongly recommend installing git bash just to get one), to compress the file that was exported. Replace the filename with the appropriate name that was generated and downloaded and run the command from the same folder where the file was downloaded to.

exported_filename="yomibaba-dictionaries-beginners-2023-07-08-05-28-08.json"; XZ_OPT="-9e -T0" tar -Jcvf "${exported_filename%.json}.tar.xz" "$exported_filename"

This will take a fair bit of time as it is trying to compress the file to the maximum possible level. Drop the XZ_OPT bits from the command if you’d rather have it compress faster even if the resulting size is larger.

You can also use 7-zip with Ultra compression level and LZMA2 compression level to compress the file if you prefer. It results in slightly bigger filesize, but it’s not too bad. It’s essentially equivalent to dropping the XZ_OPT bits from the tar command above.

In Pictures

• Import in progress

• Import complete

• Import error (happens if the file being imported gets deleted before the import is complete)

• Export progress (also shows the warning if an import/export is already in progress)

Brand new users

If you are a completely new user who hasn’t used Yomichan before then you can import dictionaries one by one from the settings page, or you can download and import someone else’s database.

Here’s a starter configuration intended for beginners: yomibaba-dictionaries-beginners-2023-07-08-05-28-08.json

Compressed version of the above to save on bandwidth: yomibaba-dictionaries-beginners-2023-07-08-05-28-08.tar.xz

You can run the following command from a POXIS shell to unzip the above (from the folder where you downloaded it):

tar -xf yomibaba-dictionaries-beginners-2023-07-08-05-28-08.tar.xz

Or you can use 7-zip if you are on windows and want a GUI, but you will have to unpack twice from the GUI (once to get the tar file and again to get the actual JSON).

It comes with the following dictionaries installed:

• JMDICT extra with examples which is the most comprehensive JP-EN dictionary
• 三省堂国語辞典　第七版 which is a JP-JP dictionary that is very beginner-friendly with short definitions and I would recommend keeping it on even as a beginner
• 新和英 which is another JP-EN dictionary. You may want to keep this off if you are a complete beginner just to have less clutter but a couple of dictionaries don’t hurt.
• デジタル大辞泉 which is another JP-JP dictionary that is very comprehensive. You may want to keep this off if you are a complete beginner.
• JMnedict which is a dictionary of names
• 日本語文法辞典(全集) aka Dictionary of Japanense Grammar (DOJG) is a grammar dictionary based on https://itazuraneko.neocities.org/grammar/dojgmain
• JLPT文法解説まとめ aka Nihongo Kyoshi which is a grammar dictionary based on https://nihongokyoshi-net.com/jlpt-grammars/. As this is a monolingual dictionary with only Japanese definitions, you may want to keep this off as a complete beginner too.
• KANJIDIC (English) which is a kanji dictionary. I would caution against worrying about Kanji too much as a beginner. Vocabulary (words, grammar terms) are much more important.
• アクセント辞典 which is a pitch accent dictionary. You also needn’t worry too much about pitch accent at the start, but it is useful to have an idea that it is a thing. See https://morg.systems/0308ae14
• CC100 which is a frequency dictionary that ranks terms based on how commonly used they are and I recommend using it to sort your results (by selecting it from General > Frequency sorting dictionary)
• JPDB which is also a frequency dictionary based on data from http://jpdb.io

Check out https://github.com/MarvNC/yomichan-dictionaries for information on the above and much more.