About

This is a Japanese-English dictionary based on the JMdict database for e-Ink Kindle devices.

Features:

• lookup of inflected verbs.

Supported Devices

The dictionary has been tested on Kindle Paperwhite. It should also work well with other e-Ink Kindle devices that were released after Paperwhite, such Kindle Voyage, Kindle Oasis, and newer generations of Kindle.

The dictionary will not work well on Kindle Fire or Kindle Android App, or any Android based Kindle, because the Kindle software on those platforms does not support inflection lookups.

Download

You can download the latest version of the dictionary from here.

Install

e-Ink Kindle

To install the dictionary into your device follow these steps:

• for 1st-generation Kindle Paperwhite devices, ensure you have firmware version 5.3.9 or higher as it includes improved homonym lookup for Japanese;

• connect your Kindle device via USB;

• copy the jmdict.mobi to the documents sub-folder;

• eject the USB device;

• on your device go to Home > Settings > Device Options > Language and Dictionaries > Dictionaries and set JMdict Japanese-English Dictionary as the default dictionary for Japanese.

Kindle Android App

NOTE: Unfortunately the Kindle Android App does not support dictionary inflections, yielding verbs lookup practically impossible. No known workaround.

• rename jmdict.mobi as B005FNK020_EBOK.prc

• connect your Android device via USB

• copy B005FNK020_EBOK.prc into Internal Storage/Android/data/com.amazon.kindle/files/ or /sdcard/android/data/com.amazon.kindle/files

This will override the default Japanese-Japanese dictionary.

Building from source

Requirements:

• Unix (tested with Linux but might work on MacOS or Cygwin with little or no changes)

• Python version 3

  • Pycairo Python

  • Pillow

• kindlegen (tested with version 2.9)

Build with:

make

To do

• Leverage more of the JMdict data:

  • cross references

• Add examples from Tanaka Corpus or Tatoeba project.

• Include a subset of Japanese proper names from ENAMDICT/JMnedict.

Credits

• Jim Breen and the JMdict/EDICT project

• John Mettraux for his EDICT2 Japanese-English Kindle dictionary

• Choplair-network for their Nihongo conjugator

Alternatives

• John Mettraux's EDICT2 Japanese-English Kindle dictionary

• Amazon Kindle Store