Rikaichan - Reading Japanese on Thunderbird, Firefox or Chrome - Problems with Thunderbird Updates

If you are a non native Japanese speaker or student you probably know about a site called Rikai ( http://www.rikai.com/perl/Home.pl ) , this was the first site that provide the capability to read Japanse content by referencing free dictionary files. Later, Browsers and Thunderbird addons were made available, allowing you to do the same without going out of your browser or mail tool.

I have been using  RikaiChan for Thunderbird email client and Firefox browser and more recently RikaiKun for chrome browser.

Those tools are different from Google translate, since they let you actually try to read the native Japanese language by just showing you how to read each of the Japanese words and also showing you a translation, word by word. This is extremely useful for those learning Japanese and not just looking into a translation made by Google. See below:

I assume that if you found this page you are already an active user, so apologies for wasting your time but I wanted to provide the background info for new users.

Well, the issue is that RikaiChan is not supported on latest Thunderbird and Firefox. For Firefox it seems that Rikaichamp is an option (sorry I did not try since I do not use Firefox). But there is no other option for Thunderbird (as of July 2019)!

Unfortunately, I did an upgrade to the latest version without knowing that  and broke RikaiChan on Thunderbird. I had no option but to revert back to that latest supported version in order to keep it working. I think it is worth doing it since latest features of Thunderbird are not so compelling. The lack of support for RikaiChan on Thunderbird is discussed here: https://github.com/birtles/rikaichamp/issues/46

It took me a while but I found out (and tested) that the latest version supported by RikaiChan Extension is Thunderbird 52.9.1. You can find the compatible addons and releases here:

- Thunderbird 52.9.1: https://archive.mozilla.org/pub/thunderbird/releases/52.9.1/win32/en-US/ (release notes here)

- Rikkaichan 3.0.2: https://addons.thunderbird.net/en-US/thunderbird/addon/rikaichan/

Just download Thunderbird 52.9.1 and install it on top of whatever release you have on your system, them you can add Rikaichan addon and it should work (you may need to install Rikaichan dictionary files, for complete instructions regarding installing Rikaichan on Thunderbird please look here: https://www.polarcloud.com/getrcx/ )

If you are using Firefox browser you can try Rikaichamp but I did not try. For Chrome RikaiKun is working fine.

Wish you luck!

Windows 10 - Copying Directory Structures without Files

Open a command prompt by clicking search and typing command , You should see the Command Prompt app, click on it.

Then type the following instructions (replace the full name for the folders below by your own directory structure). The example below copies the directory structure of C:\YourExistingFolder into a new folder called TheNewFolder under drive C:

xcopy /t /e "C:\YourExistingFolder" "C:\TheNewFolder"

/t = Copies the subdirectory structure, but not the files

/e = Copies subdirectories, including any empty ones

Please note that some instructions on the internet forget to use " " around the directory names and at least on Windows 10  this results in errors!

How do I find out my version of Windows on Windows 10

To find your version of Windows on Windows 10

1. Go to Start , enter About your PC, and then select About your PC.
2. Look under PC for Edition to find out which version and edition of Windows that your PC is running.
3. Look under PC for System type to see if you're running a 32-bit or 64-bit version of Windows.

How to Fix Windows 10 Japanese Input error - Can not use IME Input after updating to Windows 10 1803 - can not switch into Hiragana

I learned that US Windows 10 Release 1803 has a problem with Japanese input. (to check your Windows 10 version do this) See a better description of the problem here.

It seems that the problem is with the Dictionary files. So you need to fix that by copying old dictionaries into your WINDOWS>IME>IMEJP>DICTS folder (or try something else.)

Many pages like this one suggest:

"From a non-1803 system, copy the files in C:\Windows\IME\IMEJP\DICTS to the same location on the affect 1803 machine and reboot."

Someone else suggested:

"I did in a different way. 'Open advanced settings', in 'Dictionary/Auto-tuning' tab, click Repair dictionaries button. I just worked afterwards. "

I got this fixed with a script provided by my company IT group but I can not share that here Having said that it seems that the script did what was suggested above, just added some older dictionary files to the IMEJP>DICTS folder as below:


The files highligted were added by the script and then I had to reboot my system.

















I wish you luck.