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

Works great, and makes it a lot easier to play and understand Japanese games on my phone. The ability to check other similar kanji in case the app recognized it incorrectly is very convenient. Being able slide and adjust how well the app sees the character is great too. Only issue is that it occasionally doesn't grab the entire text in the selection box, but a quick retry generally fixes it.

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.

This is one of the most awesome, handy, innovative apps/(learning) tools i found (for Japanese). Amazing how it makes reading and studying easier. Especially when i talk with Japanese or read some Japanese text online for example. It would be even better if you could not only copy the selected text, but also either a kanji/compound/word or meaning. 5 stars if this is taken into improvements!

What's new

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