Why Mac users should learn Japanese

Or was it the other way round? Yes, sorry. This post is about why Japanese language lovers should (learn to) use Mac.

I got my MacBook Pro roughly one year and a half ago, when my HP laptop timely abandoned me when I was writing my BA thesis. God bless external hard disks. Anyway, it had been the third time it had completely broken down for no apparent reason, which became the excuse to get it over with Windows once and for all.

So I got this Macintosh and it was not long before I discovered there was a built-in English-to-Japanese, Japanese-to-English, Japanese synonyms and Japanese encyclopedia dictionary by Apple.

(You can see it here on one official apple website; by the way, I knew a different etymology for Macintosh)

JP synonyms

EN-JP, JP-EN

 What a delightful discovery!

What's more, those dictionaries are the good ones. I mean, the Japanese encyclopedia, for instance, is the Daijisen. It's the same I have on my portable electronic dictionary (a Casio EX-Word acquired in Japan in september 2008).

Daijisen

A japanese electronic dictionary's keyboard

It's really the same: from the following two pictures you can see the Apple Dictionary Daijisen yields the exact same results the portable Casio Daijisen does for one uncommon nominalized verb, 造り込み (tsukurikomi) I stumbled upon on the Autodesk website. By the way, I still have no clue what it means, since there is no entry in the bilingual dictionary and the monolingual encyclopedia claims it has do to with katanas. In an software/architecture context...?

Casio's Daijisen

Apple's Daijisen

Needless to say, when you study or use Japanese daily, having a state of the art electronic dictionary* is about survival: the fact that it is light, portable and allows you to draw kanji when you can't guess the reading (a feature only the latest versions have) means you are hardly ever in trouble with the language, because it has the answers – provided you can query it and read the solution. I used it every single day when in Japan, to check and learn unknown readings of ideograms on street signs, official documentation, bureaucracy, essays, newspapers and so on and so forth. It is also vital when you have to write by hand and don't remember the strokes.

But when you need to write in Japanese on your laptop, doing back and forth from your computer screen to the electronic dictionary, and having to type on two separate keyboards is annoying and time consuming.

There is a feature thanks to which you can connect your electronic dictionary to the laptop though I wouldn't really know because I didn't buy the necessary items to do that yet. (Oh, looks like an excuse to go to the other side of the world and say hi to Tokyo).

Anyway. If you have Windows, no built-in dictionaries**. Bummer. You can go on doing back and forth as described above, or use online ones. There are good tools out there. But even this complete and great online denshi jisho doesn't have all the answers, namely for tsukurikomi (I said it was uncommon!):

No entry

I still love this online tool, it has amazing features:

The online tool: specialized dictionaries

The “names and places dictionary” is just invaluable: no matter how good at japanese you are and how long you studied it, guessing people's names and place names' readings is (almost, or at least to me) impossible. Learning them all by heart, too. So when does this tool come in handy? When you have a, say, business email from someone important and don't know whether this person is a man or woman or don't know how to call them when you meet them in person. Not so small an issue in a country where calling people means saying “Hello +family name+suffix to show respect”. Resolve to adress the person with a “you” and experience at your own peril how it is unacceptable in japanese society.

It also looks wise to use this online tool before going out on a trip to unknown places: if you can recognize but not say places' names, if you get lost and want to ask for help you'll have to point to the kanji instead of just asking, which is rather inconvenient and makes you look stupid (personal experience).

But back to the main subject: if you have Macintosh, there are the built-in dictionaries!

I used to think that I had been able to activate the JP-related dictionaries only because I had added JP to my language panel, but this is not the case.

This article explains how to activate the dictionaries, and also notices that it is quite a mistery why Apple should have added only Japanese and not, say, German or Korean. You can, however, add plugins, so it is not totally impossible to have the bilingual dics you need.

The new Mac OS Lion also includes this Apple dictionary, enhanced by the newly added British Thesaurus and Dictionary. Thank you for thinking about an “European” version of English. What's next?

Mac OS Lion built-in Apple Dictionary

All three: online, Apple and electronic dictionary

*To the best of my knowledge.

**Denshi jisho in JP.