Make Smart Book work for Japanese (and other spaceless languages)!

Currently, Smart Book isn’t optimal for any language that lacks spaces. The problem is, without spaces the pop-up dictionary has no way to tell where words begin and end. There are tons of great tools out now for parsing these languages—but they would need to be implemented. I’ll discuss Japanese since that’s the language I know more about, but I’m happy for anyone who knows more about another spaceless language to chime in. Japanese is made of kanji (elaborate symbols that look like this, borrowed from Chinese: 蒜肥留) which are used for nouns and verbs, but we don’t know how they sound by looking at them. They’re read depending on what word they appear in. In addition to kanji, Japanese has two different syllabaries that look like this ひいよ and this ケムラ which are used for foreign loan words, for conjugations of verbs, as particles to mark grammatical functions, and more. These don’t represent ideas like kanji do, they represent sounds: usually a pairing of one consonant with one vowel sound. So ひ is the sound or syllable “hee” and の is “no.” の can be a particle indicating possession, so if 私 means me and 本 means book, 私の本 is “my book.” But at the end of a sentence it only adds an emotional tone to the sentence. And it can appear in words spelled fully in hiragana as well. Without a parser, the dictionary has no clue if it is or isn’t part of a word, conjugation, etc. If it appears in a word, the pop-up dictionary will treat it as if it were by itself and say it indicates possession. The dictionary isn’t so bad with kanji. So I suspect it might not be so bad for Chinese, where everything consist of hanzi and only hanzi. I’d love for a Chinese reader to chime in on this. But it’s almost useless with the hiragana (ひいよ) and katakana (ケムラ), and this makes it impossible to meaningfully parse sentences in Japanese. You can’t learn conjugations on the fly by reading Japanese like you can with Spanish, for example, because you can’t tell where the conjugation actually begins or ends. This is not a problem for an advanced reader of Japanese, but it’s an impossible hurdle for the beginner. Japanese readers mostly rely on other tools to read, but there isn’t any one particular reader that dominates, and I believe Smart Book could take over the market without much effort. If Kurs is interested in promoting Smart Book to Japanese learners, I would especially recommend talking to the owner of JPBD, another one man passion project and possibly the best single resource for Japanese. JPBD is an online dictionary that shows word frequency information and allows the user to create flashcard decks directly from the dictionary entry page. If Smart Book were to be implemented together with JPBD, this could make it the most powerful tool for reading in Japanese by far.