Japanese Software and Information

 I enjoy learning Japanese. I have placed some free software here that people (especially students) interested in Japanese may find useful. Additionally, I have placed some vocabulary files here that people studying Japanese at UCLA may find interesting. Finally, I have included links to other sites that produce Japanese software, or other related topics.

JWPce is HERE!............ JFC is HERE!

Contents

JWP -- A Japanese Word Processor, Version 1.31
Copyright (C)1996, Stephen Chung, All rights reserved

NOTE! If you are using Windows 95/98/NT/2000, I suggest that you use JWPce. Generally it operates faster, is easier to install, and has more features. instead of JWP!

JWP Trouble-shooting guide
Help for fixing some common problems.

What is JWP Anyway?

JWP is a freeware Japanese word processor, provided primarily by Stephen Chung, and is available free to anyone under the terms of the GNU General Public License. You are welcome to make a copy for your own uses, as well as to distribute it to other people. The GNU General Public License binds you to the agreement that you always distribute full copies of the program, and that you can charge a distribution fee for distributing it. However, no part(s) of JWP may be included in any commercial product, nor may any commercial product include portion(s) derived from part(s) of JWP, without the explicit permission of the respective copyright holder(s).

When designing JWP, the highest priority was given to basic Japanese word processing functions. It does not (yet) have fancy font-control and advanced layout features found in other high-end English word processors. You can always use Japanese PageMaker for that purpose.

It is assumed that JWP will be used mainly to handle Japanese text with an occasional English word or two. The program is not optimized to handle writings with large amount of English text and a few Japanese characters; for those circumstances, it is much better to employ a normal English word processor and paste in Japanese bitmaps.

I Just Want to Download it Now!

NOTE! If you are using Windows 95/98/NT/2000, I suggest that you use JWPce. Generally it operates faster, is easier to install, and has more features. instead of JWP!

Remember it's a BIG file (takes over 2 hours at 28k)! 6.3MB! OK!

OKay You Got It!

Hardware and Software Requirements

JWP is designed to be run on IBM PC and compatible computers under the Microsoft Windows operating environment, version 3.1 or higher. As a result, a computer with an 80286 CPU or higher is required. Although you can run Windows with 2 MB of RAM in the computer, the minimum recommended set-up is 4 MB for acceptable performance.

JWP is very processing-intensive. A faster computer will greatly enhance the program's responsiveness. It is highly recommended that you use at least a 33 MHz 80486 computer. Slower computers may give annoying delays, especially when working with large paragraphs.

The zip file containing JWP will require 6.3MB of hard drive storage. The Final installed version of JWP will require 13MB of storage. When performing the install operation, you will need 20MB of total free space (the zip archive, and all the uncompressed files)!

Disclaimers

Because this program is free software, it is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. This means that if you lose millions of dollars because you used the program, tough. So there.

You should choose the About JWP command from the Help menu to read some of the background information concerning JWP. In particular, you can:

  1. Read the disclaimer the comes with JWP.
  2. Read the copyright notices for JWP.
  3. Read the GNU General Public License.
  4. See the names of people involved in JWP's development.

You are also encouraged to contact the people involved in the JWP project. They may have resources and software that you'll like.

Installation

  1. Create a new directory for JWP.

    For example, if you want to call the directory 'JWP' in the 'C:' drive, you should type (in DOS): 

                C:  {Return}
            MD \JWP  {Return}
  2. Switch to the JWP directory.

    Type the following in DOS: 

                CD \JWP  {Return}
  3. Unpack all the `zip' files into the new sub-directory.

    For example (in DOS): 

                PKUNZIP JWP13ALL.ZIP {Return}

    Need PKUNZIP, get it here (30k).

  4. Copy the .dll files to your Windows System directory.

    Copy the two .dll files (CTL3D32.DLL and CTL3DV2.DLL) to your Windows System directory. In many systems, the Windows System directory is something like `C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM'.

    If you already have the file CTL3DV2.DLL in your Windows System directory, you should double-check the dates on the two files. Use the most recent one.

    For example (in DOS): 

                COPY  *.DLL  C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM  {Return}
  5. ERASE the file CTL3DV2.DLL from your JWP directory.

    Due to a command from Microsoft Oh-High, JWP may not work if a copy of CTL3DV2.DLL or CTL3D32.DLL is left in the program directory.

    For example (in DOS): 

                ERASE  CTL3DV2.DLL  {Return}
  6. JWP is ready to run.

    Unlike many commercial Windows programs, JWP does not automatically install itself into the Program Manager. It is necessary for you to use the "File New" command and add a program item into the appropriate program group. You can now run JWP by double-clicking on the JWP icon.

    If you are using Windows 3.x you should run the program JWP.EXE. If you are using Windows 95 or Windows NT, you should run the program JWP32.EXE.

    Additional information is provided in the readme files contained in the archive, and in the manual for JWP: MANUAL.DOC (Word format), or MANUAL.EXE (an on-line viewer).

  7. ERASE the original zip archive.

    If you don't want to keep the original zip archive, you can delete it now.

    For example (in DOS): 

                ERASE  JWP13ALL.ZIP  {Return}

Download

NOTE! If you are using Windows 95/98/NT/2000, I suggest that you use JWPce. Generally it operates faster, is easier to install, and has more features. instead of JWP!

Remember it's a BIG file (takes over 2 hours at 28k)! 6.3MB! OK!

GET IT ALREADY!

JWP Trouble-shooting guide

Some problems have shown up installing JWP. This section is to pass along these problems and solutions to them. The problems focused on here are in the 32-bit (Windows 95) version of JWP, but may well apply to the 16-bit (Windows 3.x) version also.

I will expand this section if (and when) more problems become known (e-mail: grosenthal@physics.ucla.edu).

NJWIN -- NJStar CJK Multilingual Support System Version 1.80
Copyright (c) Hongbo Data Systems 1995-1997 All Rights Reserved.

What is NJStar Anyway?

 NJWIN v1.80 is shareware designed to support any windows program to display Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters under the standard Windows environment. All Chinese / Japanese / Korean (CJK) coding standards are supported in NJWIN, and coding can be switched on the fly from one coding to another depending on the document being viewed.

The Internet is the fastest growing communication tool today. Therefore, many of NJWIN's features are added specifically for Internet. As the result, NJWIN is best Internet CJK viewer for browsing CJK Web pages, reading CJK news in UseNet newsgroups and reading CJK email messages.

NJWIN is distributed as Shareware, permission granted for any one to distribute NJWIN free of charge by any media.

NJWIN is produced by Hongbo Data Systems, along with several other software products for CJK languages. Visit their web page at NJStar Japanese Software .


I Just Can't Wait, I HAVE to have it Now!

Remember it's a BIG file! 2.5MB! OK!

GET IT ALREADY!

Hardware and Software Requirements

 Supports All Windows Platforms: NJWIN now supports all windows platforms including all language versions of Windows 3.1x, Windows 95, Windows NT (16 bit applications only), OS/2 Windows mode, and PowerMac Soft Windows.

The zip file containing NJWIN will require 2.5MB of hard drive storage. The Final installed version of NJWIN will require 5MB of storage. When performing the install operation, you will need 7.5MB of total free space (the archive, and all the uncompressed files)!

Instalation

  1. Run the install program.

    From file manager, or such run the program NJWIN180.EXE, and follow the simple directions.

  2. NJWIN is ready to run.

    Just run it from ProgramManager, or the Start menu, and you will be able to view Japanese, Korean, or Chinese characters. See on-line help, or the included readme file for more information.

  3. ERASE the original zip archive, temporary directory, and files.

    If you don't want to keep the original archive (njwin180.exe), you can delete it now.

Download

Remember it's a BIG file! 2.5MB! OK!

GET IT ALREADY!

Software for Japanese
Other Japanese software you may find interesting.

This section contains listings of other software for Japanese. Much of this software I have not used, but am simply listing. When I have used the software I have indicated some information about it.

Computers and Japanese
A very short description of how Japanese text is stored in computers

 English characters are almost entirely stored by computers in a system called ASCII. In this system each character is given a number from 0 to 127, and they are stored in a binary number referred to as a byte. (Actually a byte can store numbers in the range 0-255, but for historical reasons the upper 128 numbers are not used.)

This system works well for English, where there are very view characters. In Japanese, however, there are many more characters (if you include names and all, over 60,000 characters), thus such a direct storage system could not be used. In addition, early computers did not support Japanese at all, and systems that were designed to support Japanese attempted to be compatible with existing English based systems. The basic idea used it to flag either each or every special character with a marker indicating how the computer should process the next bytes of data to generate Japanese characters.

The basic idea is all well and good, but when it was implemented, and reimplemented, and reimplemented, and improved, and changed, and improved some more, etc...... This resulted in a number of separate encoding system that are used for Japanese. The major systems are JIS (Japanese Industrial Standard) and EUC (Extended UNIX Code). To make matters worse, the JIS system has several varieties.

The following describes the basic systems of encoding Japanese characters. To understand the following description, the following terms must be understood. ASCII refers to the English character set (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, etc.), and double-byte characters refer to the Japanese characters (kanji, katakana, hiragana, etc.):

Okay, that was interesting, but what does it mean? The final meaning of the whole thing, is that when you display or read Japanese, on a computer, make sure you have the right encoding, or it won't make any sense. (Note, some programs will attempt to automatically detect which system is being used.)

Shift-JIS seems to be the most common format, so try that first. Second to that is EUC, then the varieties of the JIS format. If you encounter a web page in Unicode (there are some), you will need to use an interpreter that understands Unicode. Newer versions of NJWin understand Unicode. Unicode support is available in JWPce. JWP, however, does not support Unicode.

Books for Students of Japanese
My opinion on several books for students of Japanese

I have been studying Japanese for five years now, and have developed opinions about many different books. For those of you are interested, these are books that I either find to be interesting or useful, or (on some occasions) not.

Other Links Related to Japanese
Things you might find interesting

 These are simply links to other sites on Japan that you may find interesting. Many of the sights are of specific interest to students of Japanese.

Travel Related Links (including relocation information)

Reading Japanese News Papers Online
How to deal with Japanese text, dictionaries, kanji, etc.

For non-native speakers of Japanese, wishing wanting to practice reading material designed for native speakers (i.e. not designed for a class), reading materials in electronic from have a number of advantages. First, since the material is in electronic form, an electronic dictionary and/or kanji lookup can be used. These are both faster and easier than the print forms. The problem, however, is that getting Japanese materials, displaying it correctly, and getting it into your dictionaries can be somewhat difficult. This section attempts to answer some of the common questions, and give solutions to some of the common problems associated with reading Japanese materials in electronic form.

Getting Started

First, I will assume that you are using a PC running Windows-(3.x, 95, or NT). (Personally, if you are still using Windows 3.x you may want to consider upgrading to Windows 95.) I will also assume that you are using Netscape or Microsoft Explorer as your browser. If you are using some other browser, the information here may still be useful, but only in a general form.

I know, I know, just get me to the links!

Internet Explorer Multi-Language Support

If you are using Internet Explorer 3.x or better you can add full support for Japanese text. These modules allow Internet explorer to correctly display and format Japanese characters. They remove the need for using a display program (such as NJWin) when browsing the web. Additionally, since you can use Internet Explorer to display a file on your computer, you may not need a display augmentation program. The Multi-Language Support kits can be obtained from Microsoft at: Internet Explorer Support Site.

Note that the Multi-Lange Support for Internet Explorer contains Japanese True-type font that prints much nicer than most bitmapped fonts. Additionally, this font can be used with Netscape or JWPce.

To activate the Multi-Language Support for Internet Explorer 3.x, select the menu item View/Options.... Then under the General tab select "Font Settings...". Then set the default language to Japanese. When you are done viewing Japanese pages, you may want to set this back to "Western".

To activate the Multi-Language Support for Internet Explorer 4.x or better, select the menu item View/Fonts/Japanese (Auto-Select). This will automatically adjust for the correct Japanese font. Unlike Internet Explorer 3.x your default language should still be Western, and the default font will change as necessary. Internet Explorer 4.x attempts to adjust the font depending what is on the page, switching back to a western font when no Japanese characters are on the on the entire page. Generally, this works well, however, I have noticed a view times that the system did not switch into Japanese display mode correctly. In these cases, simply reselect View/Fonts/Japanese (Auto-Select).

The fonts provided with the Internet Explorer Multi-Language Support are very nice and easy to read. Additionally, the formatting is nice, and you don't have to run two programs like Netscape (see below). The only major problem is that English text displayed in the Japanese font is somewhat ugly. The only fix to this is to use a program like NJWin. If you are using Internet Explorer 3.x, the ugly font may be a real problem, forcing you to keep changing back and forth between the Japanese font and your normal Western font. If you are using Internet Explorer 4.x, however, the system will change the fonts automatically, so the ugly font is not so bad.

WARNING! Internet Explorer 4.0 (or above) are a Unicode applications. This means that you cannot paste data from Internet Explorer into an application like JWP, since JWP does not understand Unicode. You can still use Internet Explorer, but you must use a version of JWPce that supports Unicode or some other Unicode application for dictionary services.

Netscape Options

If you are using Netscape, you have four basic options: buy a Japanese font, run a program like NJWin (see below) to display Japanese text, switch to Internet Explorer, or simply use the font from Internet Explorer's Multi-Language Support kit. (You may have to install Internet Explorer, however, to get the font out the of the package.)

No mater how you display the Japanese characters in Netscape, you need to tell Netscape that you want it to interpret the data it receives as Japanese text. If you do not, the program will not format the display correctly, and the page will be difficult to read. This is done by selecting View/Encoding/Japanese (Auto-Detect).

If you have a Japanese font, you can get Netscape to display it by selecting Edit/Preferences.... Within the Dialog, Select Appearance and then Fonts. Now set "For the Encoding" to Japanese, and select as your variable width font your Japanese Font. (The standard Japanese font distributed with Internet Explorer's Multi-Language kit is "MS Mincho", but "MS Gothic" also work.)

Displaying Japanese Characters, Another Way

Most Japanese pages on the web are in Japanese. This means that you will need to be able to display Japanese characters to view these pages. These are a number of programs that allow you to do this. Some of these other programs are described in the software section. I personally used NJWin, until recently when I switch to Microsoft's Internet Explorer with the multi-language support.

Japanese characters stored in electronic form are stored in a number of different formats. The dominate of these are JIS, Shift-JIS, and EUC. For web sites, the Shift-JIS and EUC formats are dominant (although Unicode and UTF-8 are becoming popular), The JIS format uses escape codes, thus can be more easily transmitted through some old e-mail system, so it is still in use. If you are using NJWin, set the decoding for "Japanese Auto Detect" This will generally determine the format of the text you are working with and display it correctly. On rare occasions, however, it may miss-detect the format, and you will have to explicitly set the format.

At this point, you should be able to view a Japanese web page, and see the Japanese text. The formatting of the text, however, may not be correct. This is because your browser is expecting to break lines at the spaces, and most Japanese text has no spaces. Further, if a space does exist, be is encoded as a Japanese space character your browser will not recognize it correctly. To get around this problem, you need to tell your browser that you are attempting to read Japanese text.

To correctly format text in Internet Explorer 3.x, select the menu item View/Options.... Then under the General tab select "Font Settings...". Then set the default language to Japanese. When you are done viewing Japanese pages, you may want to set this back to Western.

To correctly format text in Internet Explorer 4.x, select the menu item View/Fonts/Japanese (Auto-Select). This will automatically adjust for the correct Japanese font. Unlike Internet Explorer 3.x your default language should still be Western, and the default font will change as necessary. Internet Explorer 4.x attempts to adjust the font depending what is on the page, switching back to a western font when no Japanese characters are on the on the entire page. Generally, this works well, however, I have noticed a view times that the system did not switch into Japanese display mode correctly. In these cases, simply reselect View/Fonts/Japanese (Auto-Select).

If you are using Netscape you need to set the encoding to Japanese. For Netscape 4.x this is done by selecting the menu item View/Encoding/Japanese (Auto-Detect). This will cause the browser to correctly display Japanese. Note, selecting this option does not appear to interfere with displaying English web pages, so you can simply leave it selected. For Netscape 3.x there is a similar option to format the text for Japanese.

Using a dictionary

If you are learning Japanese, you will most likely need to use a dictionary to read an actual Japanese web site. There are a number of online dictionaries provided by several different sites, but I find that these dictionaries are very difficult to use. Instead, I simply run JWP or JWPce and use the dictionary contained there. When using either of these dictionaries, you can simply open the dictionary dialog box. Highlight text in the web browser, copy the text to the clipboard, then paste the text (unless you have redefined your keys, shift+Insert) into the dictionary search box, and search.

If you are using JWPce, the default clipboard format is Auto-Detect, and will convert to whatever format is necessary on the fly. In order to use the dictionary included with JWP, you will have to set the clipboard format so that JWP knows how to interpret the clipboard data. By default, JWP uses EUC coding for the clipboard, but most web sites use shift-JIS encoding. To change the clipboard format, select the menu item Utilities/Options.... The clipboard format is located in the upper right hand corner to the dialog box.

WARNING! Internet Explorer 4.0 is a Unicode application. This means that you cannot paste data from Internet Explorer 4.0 into an application like JWP, since JWP does not understand Unicode. You can still use Internet Explorer 4.0, but you must use a version of JWPce that supports Unicode or some other Unicode application for dictionary services.

Looking up kanji

 Generally, you will want to look-up entire words in a dictionary, however, sometimes, you may want to simply look up a kanji. Following the technique above, I simply use the kanji information features of JWP or JWPce to find information about a particular kanji. If you are using JWPce, you can highlight a character in the browser, copy to the clipboard, bring up the character information dialog (ctrl+I), then click on the "from clipboard" button to get information from a character on the clipboard. If you are using JWP, you must first highlight a kanji in the browser, copy to the clipboard, then paste it into JWP (into a file), then highlight the kanji in JWP and then call up the kanji information (ctrl+K).

Reading large articles

If you are interested in reading a large article (what constitutes large is left up to you), then I suggest, you do not read it online, but rather simply copy the entire article to the clipboard, and paste it into whichever word processor you are using (JWPce, JWP, etc.), and read the article off-line.

Dealing with links

One of the problems that you may encounter is that when you first visit a web page, you are faced with a large number of links in Japanese. You want to know what the links say, but when you try to highlight them you end up selecting them. I personally find that the best way to avoid this is to start your selection to the right of the link, and drag the selection region back over the link. Generally, this works much better than dragging from the left.

Okay, I know how to read stuff, but where do I go?

Here are a number of links to various Japanese news papers that are available on line: The above links came from Web Sites for Japanese students.

Additionally, there are a number of good links pages that have links to japanese news papers and print media on line:

Vocabulary Lists
UCLA Japanese 1-6, 100, 101, and 120 (reading)

I have been accumulating vocabulary lists while learning Japanese. I use this information to help learn kanji. In particular, when I learn a new kanji, I scan the vocabulary lists for all other words (that I should now know) that use the same kanji. I can then put all of these words in my study list, this helps me retain the kanji, by having a larger number of words that use that kanji. It also helps to make the meaning of the kanji clear.

I do not know if anyone else is interested in these lists, but I have provided them. The files were originally provided in JWP format because of formatting problems with writing and reading other formats with JWP. Recently, however, I have been doing all my work in JWPce. JWPce can read and write other types of Japanese text formats and still preserve the file format. At this point I have converted all the vocabulary files to shift-JIS. This file format should be readable in any Japanese word processing program.

If you are using Netscape, and are not setup to display Japanese text on line, simply shift click on the files to download them.

These lists are also being made available in JFC format.

This section contains reading assignments used in Japanese 120 (Japanese linguistics). These are optional reading assignments for students on the "Japanese track".

For people who simply want to download the assignments, click on the entries in this list (this would be my actual suggestion): 

page maintained by glenn rosenthal
revision history

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