I had started a write up on some tools I use for learning and immersing in japanese, but a reason I ended up not posting was just because of how fast the development of these things have been lately, so I thought it would be best to wait a bit.

Now that I'm gonna be traveling for a couple weeks and have a lot of free time while at my parents, I figured I'd setup my phone to read books again and was pleased to find 2 new things:

Yomitan

Chances are if you're learning japanese you've heard of Yomichan, or Rikaikun or Migaku, which are instant dictionary extensions for your browser. Hover a word you don`t know and voila, you've got its definition/translation! Yomichan's differential from the other 2 is that not only it's FOSS but also it allows complete customization of your dictionaries.

But also it was discontinued last year. Yomitan started being worked on by the community to keep it alive and also bring any possible enhancements. Currently most of the work has been done on the back end, like ensuring future compatibility with the Manifest V3 transition as V2 will stop being supported by browsers next year, so I recommend switching over if you're already a Yomichan user based on that alone! Conversations on the discord also look promising but we'll see!

Jitendex

Jitendex is a dictionary based on jmdict and other free projects, in the same vein as Jisho.org, but with the goal of also looking pretty good and reducing information overload! This project derives from other jmdict-based yomichan dictionaries that already did some of that but this one goes beyond and is also much more lightweight! There are some comparisons on the github page for you to see for yourself! Check it out!

I recommend checking both of these out! If you hadn't used Yomichan/Yomitan before, the setup is very straightforward and the github page also has a step-by-step tutorial! You can also link it to Anki so you can have a deck made of the words you looked up!

This extension is so good at what it does that it basically made lots of people make their own tools to allow japanese media appreciation by hooking things into the browser so you can look up the words way more quickly, so you can use it for watching anime, playing games and visual novels, reading novels, etc. etc. A proper post about these to be coming next year!