It’s been almost three years since the first release of OpenJisho. There hasn’t been much activity in the repository between 2022 and 2023, but I’ve been working hard this week updating dependencies and configuration files in order to add new features. I’m happy to announce a new version today with some significant changes.
New feature: Input Sentence
There’s a new screen that lets you input a body of text and output a list of JMdict entries for every word found. You can access this screen from the main menu.
The UI is meant to be as similar as possible to the example sentences shown in the main screen. The app doesn’t have yet an algorithm for accurately splitting sentences into Japanese words, so you have to separate words with spaces (’ ’) for this to work.
Real world text usually has verbs conjugated in forms that are not listed in the dictionary. If you’d like to look for the correct entry, but preserve the original conjugation in your sentence you can use Tatoeba indices syntax. Here is an example:
Notice how this sentence uses “建てられた” but we want to lookup “建てる” instead. By using the curly braces (“{}”) we can tell the parser to lookup the previous word, but to display the one inside the braces. This is helpful in more complex bodies of text, when you need to constantly reread the whole thing to understand it without losing any context.
New Releases on GitHub
Starting with this version, OpenJisho releases are now going to be on GitHub instead of Google Play. You can use this website to download the latest version.
The reason for this change is that my Google Play account along with the OpenJisho listing has been removed. I don’t know why Google did this, but inactivity was probably one of the reasons. I don’t like using Google products, so I created a Google account specifically for publishing this app and never logged in again. If I do it again, it will most certainly end the same way, so I think GitHub is the better choice for this.
Google Play was convenient for pushing new versions to users. Since I can’t use it anymore, I’ve also added a notification in the main screen whenever a new version available. The app now checks what the latest released version is using a single HTTP request to the GitHub pages site. It looks like this:
