KaiwaLens

JAPANESE ON SCREEN

Read the Japanese on your screen.

Point KaiwaLens at any part of your screen and it reads the Japanese there, splits it into words, and shows you the reading and meaning of each one: a game, a manga page, a PDF, a video, a website that will not let you select text. It runs on your computer. No account, no subscription, nothing sent anywhere.

Free. No account.

Install

On its first start KaiwaLens downloads its dictionaries, about 280 MB, once. After that it works offline.

Windows

1. Run the installer. It asks whether to install for you only, which needs no administrator, or for everyone on the computer.
2. The installer is not signed yet, so Windows may say “Windows protected your PC”: choose More info, then Run anyway.
3. KaiwaLens updates itself.

Ubuntu

1. Install the package: sudo apt install ./kaiwalens_<version>_amd64.deb
2. To update, install the new package from this page.

macOS

1. Open the disk image and drag KaiwaLens to Applications.
2. The app is not notarized yet, so macOS will not open it the first time. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security and choose Open Anyway.
3. Allow Screen Recording when KaiwaLens asks: it needs it to read your screen.
4. To update, install the new disk image from this page.

How it reads Japanese

Where Does a Japanese Word End? How the engine cuts a line into words, walks each form back to its dictionary word and names its grammar, with the mathematics under each step. No Japanese needed. By Lavrentii Ivanov. PDF, 4 pages.

Other files

• Every download
• The dictionary corpus, published under CC BY-SA 4.0 (its licence and sources)
• The source code on GitHub