
Using Kakaku.com, the extremely popular Japanese price comparison search engine, you can save a lot of money, but there are naturally a variety of caveats inherent. Here I present a guide to using Kakaku.com which will hopefully give you an idea of how to use it to best effect.
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Having explained a little about how great Rikaichan is, I’d like to introduce an excellent tool for many of the instances where Rikaichan is unusable: StarDict. This open source and cross platform dictionary software functions similarly to Rikaichan, but is not bound to a browser, being stand alone software.
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There are a few dictionary tools no student of Japanese should be without. The first amongst these is the by now quite well known Rikaichan, a dictionary extension for Firefox which, when activated, displays an inflection sensitive dictionary entry popup on mouseover of Japanese text. The original site based Rikai is now basically defunct, but deserves credit for implementing the idea.
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