Photo by H Iguchi

Pocket proficiency

Tired of lugging around your 1,616-page, 2-kg copy of “The New Nelson?” Trade in your dead tree for the snazzy “Quicktionary 2 Kanji Reader,” which looks like a high-tech highlighter. The device was jointly developed by Israeli company Wizcom and Tokyo-based Japan21 Inc. Though the first iteration was an English-to-Japanese dictionary, “Quicktionary2” does both E-J and J-E, recognizing 3,000 characters — enough to get through a newspaper.

Turn on the built-in speaker and a voice will read the words aloud, talking you through your translating task. See the website for a 20 percent discount, available for a limited time. (Beau Miller/Metropolis)

Additional Information:

29,800 yen. Available online at www.kanjireader.net.

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7 Comments

ganurobotto at 02:26 PM JST - 28th September

wow thats cool..
MrMukatsuku at 03:30 PM JST - 28th September

wow that's almost 10 years old
zaichik at 05:27 PM JST - 28th September

Wow, that's the second article about it in JT in the space of 6 weeks.
lipscombe at 08:26 PM JST - 28th September

Tired of lugging around your 1,616-page, 2-kg copy of “The New Nelson?”

not really
borscht at 10:30 PM JST - 28th September

Instead of lugging around a kanji reader with snazzy built-in highlighter (oooh!) you could, er, learn the 3000 kanji or find a friend of the opposite sex who can already read them.
bamboohat at 12:16 AM JST - 29th September

Yea, like I'm gonna buy a tool that would take away a legitamite reason for walking up to hottie in a bookstore and using the infamous "what's this kanji?" opener.
Helly at 01:08 AM JST - 29th September

Doesn't work on emails...