How to use Free Software to learn Japanese, and more.

Rikaitan dictionaries

December 13, 2020 — Tatsumoto Ren

This article provides download links for dictionary files for Rikaitan. Rikaitan is a browser extension with a pop-up dictionary that lets you look up unknown words by hovering your mouse. Follow this setup guide to install Rikaitan. To make Anki cards, don't forget to install AnkiConnect.


Beginner dictionaries

For beginners, Rikaitan provides a set of basic bilingual dictionaries. Learners can use these for the first few months, then delete them after going monolingual (covered later). To enable Rikaitan lookups, you must download and import at least one dictionary.

Downloads

Mainline dictionaries

An archive with dictionaries for Rikaitan can be downloaded by following the link below.

Download links
Sources

The dictionaries were compiled from various places. Below is a list of public folders that were used.

Go to Rikaitan settings and select the "Dictionaries" tab on the left side, then click the button "Configure installed and enabled dictionaries…". Press "Import" to import a new dictionary.

About

Each folder in the main archive contains a file called "README.md". Open it to see additional information about the dictionaries.

Kaikki

kaikki-to-rikaitan is a catalog of dictionary files converted from wiktionary data from kaikki.org.

Download links

Don't import all Rikaitan dictionaries

You need multiple dictionaries because Japanese-Japanese dictionaries have gaps. Some words appear only in specific dictionaries.

A few examples:

  • 夢海鼠 is only in 日本国語大辞典.
  • 禿同 is only in 実用日本語表現辞典.

Though you might think that using every dictionary in Rikaitan is a good idea and load up all of them, I would advise you not to do so. Sometimes the word that you're trying to look up isn't the one that comes up first in the dictionary. If you want to find it, you have to scroll down. And if you have many dictionaries imported, this is going to be pretty annoying.

Each installed dictionary enlarges Rikaitan's database and can add several GiB to disk usage.

So I recommend you keep as few dictionaries in Rikaitan as possible and use Qolibri or GoldenDict for words you can't find.

Custom CSS for images

If you want to use デジタル大辞泉 or 旺文社国語辞典, images may render incorrectly unless you append the following rules to your Popup CSS. If this happens, go to Rikaitan settings > "Appearance" > "Configure custom CSS...".

Popup CSS for images
.gloss-image-description {
    text-align: center;
}
.definition-item-content,
.gloss-image-link {
    max-width: 100%;
}
.gloss-image-container {
    background: none !important;
}
.gloss-image-link[data-has-aspect-ratio="true"] .gloss-image {
    position: static;
    max-height: 200px;
}
.gloss-image-link[data-has-aspect-ratio="true"] .gloss-image-aspect-ratio-sizer {
    display: none;
}
.gloss-image-container-overlay {
    display: none;
}
img {
    will-change: transform;
}

Custom CSS for Kanji Dictionaries

Rikaitan's kanji dictionary viewer contains a lot of redundant information, such as duplicated tags, stroke order diagrams, and empty table rows for each entry. To make the kanji entries more concise when using multiple kanji dictionaries, you can add some CSS rules.

In "Settings" > "Popup Appearance" > "Configure custom CSS..." paste the following CSS to condense displayed entries.

CSS for kanji
/* remove misc dict classifications/codepoints/stats */
.kanji-glyph-data > tbody > tr:nth-child(n + 3) {
  display: none;
}
/* remove stroke diagram, freq, header for next entries */
div.entry[data-type='kanji']:nth-child(n + 2) .kanji-glyph-container,
div.entry[data-type='kanji']:nth-child(n + 2) [data-section-type='frequencies'],
div.entry[data-type='kanji']:nth-child(n + 2) table.kanji-glyph-data > tbody > tr:first-child {
  display: none;
}
/* remove 'No data found' */
.kanji-info-table-item-value-empty {
  display: none;
}
/* reduce extra padding */
.kanji-glyph-data,
div.entry[data-type='kanji'],
div.entry[data-type='kanji']:nth-child(n + 2) .kanji-glyph-data > tbody > tr > *,
.kanji-glyph-data dl.kanji-readings-japanese,
div.entry[data-type='kanji']:nth-child(n + 2)
  .kanji-glyph-data
  dl.kanji-readings-chinese[data-count='0'] {
  padding-top: 0 !important;
  padding-bottom: 0 !important;
  margin-bottom: 0em;
  margin-top: 0 !important;
}
/* remove horizontal lines */
.entry + .entry[data-type='kanji'],
div#dictionary-entries > div.entry:nth-child(n + 2) .kanji-glyph-data > tbody > tr > * {
  border-top: none !important;
}
/* change decimal list */
.kanji-gloss-list {
  list-style-type: circle;
}

Tags: dictionaries, rikaitan