Kaku Japanese Dictionary (OCR)

0xBAD1D3A5

About this app

🌸 The Quickest Way to Lookup Kanji on Your Device
Kaku is a fast, powerful Japanese dictionary that stays on top of all your apps. It uses optical character recognition (OCR) technology to recognize kanji on the device screen for you (rather than the slowww tedious process of looking up individual characters manually), making it perfect for Japanese learners who want to study by reading raw manga, play untranslated mobile games, and so on without the hassle of switching apps on Android.

🌸 Inspired by the Best Japanese Reading Tools
If you ever used KanjiTomo, this is the Android equivalent. Kaku is also the closest you can get to browser extensions like Rikaikun / Rikaichan / Rikaisama / Yomichan on Android.

🌸 Open up Endless Study Opportunities
Being able to quickly lookup kanji inside any app makes it easier to practice Japanese than ever. Use Kaku to:
 • Transition to reading your favorite manga in Japanese instead of English
 • Play numerous untranslated Japanese mobile games not available in the English
 • Easily lookup kanji in apps that don't allow copying of text, i.e., Twitter
 • Read Japanese in the original app instead of "sharing" the text to another reader app
 • Use Kaku with Chrome as Android's version of the Rikai-tachis
 • Lookup kanji in random images you may encounter

🌸 Keeping it Classy and Free
Kaku works entirely offline and does not collect nor send user data. Finally, Kaku is open-source, and you can browse the code here: https://github.com/0xbad1d3a5/Kaku

https://kaku.fuwafuwa.ca

Ratings and reviews

The controls are cumbersome, tedious, and hard to get used to, but this app saves stunningly huge amounts of time and frustration nonetheless. I can't find anything like it elsewhere, so five stars. Better controls, please! Also if it could integrate with some of the other popular Japanese apps like Kanji Study or Anki, that would be awesome.

I think it would be nice if there was an auto mode where text was translated automatically, or anytime the box is no longer being touched (so a single tap would translate). Double tapping moves the box sometimes and feels clunky. The ocr text that shows up could have a better ui. It's big and doesn't read well. It's also hard to copy from, but I like that tapping shows the dictionary result.

I love this app - it's made me a lot more efficient in my Japanese learning. I like reading manga but it's a lot of work to look up words while read manga on my phone. This app has made that way easier. And being able to highlight text and have it translated right away is another great feature. Since I started using this app I've converted my random reddit reading on the phone into productive Japanese learning. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to learn Japanese!

What's new

Downgrade Tesseract version as it was causing issues with vertical text recognition.