Have you ever not understood important mail in the post? Ordered the wrong dish at a restaurant? Not understood someone’s job title on a business card? Felt frustrated in your Japanese studies? I have many times over, but fortunately there is now a solution.

Having taken the Japanese proficiency tests all the way from level 4 through 1 (and failing!) it was obvious that the biggest barrier to understanding Japanese is not the inability to pronounce “tsu” or roll your “r”s like an oyaji, but the enormity of the task of memorizing thousands of kanji. This was apparent simply by observing the vast number of westerners in the level 3 and 4 tests compared to the total lack of westerners taking level 1 (my test room contained myself and 30 Chinese!). If only we had a tool that would make reading those pesky kanji easier. Well, now we do.

The Quicktionary2 Kanji Reader, produced by WizCom and jointly developed and marketed by Japan21 Inc, is the answers to all your kanji reading prayers. The pen is able to scan over kanji and provide you with the reading (hiragana and romaji), plus a simple English translation in a matter of seconds. Long gone are the days of spending 10 minutes flicking through the stroke and radical index in a kanji dictionary to find out that one kanji making the whole sentence incomprehensible. (Plus there is the added bonus of vastly reducing the weight you carry around - the pen is about 2 fingers in width and only slightly longer than a regular pen, making it highly portable.)

The pen is easy to use – you simply roll it over the word or sentence and it will pick up the text and display it on the built-in screen. It automatically selects words formed by kanji combinations so you don’t have to look up the kanji twice, and you can select Jpn – Jpn or Eng – Jpn as other options. The pen has several modes allowing you to pick up kanji from different backgrounds and either horizontal or vertical flowing text.

So, that’s what the Kanji Reader can do – but how is it useful? Well, I’ve personally found it to be invaluable for several purposes. The first is in my Japanese studies. As I challenge myself to read gradually more difficult articles, I encounter many new words that I previously would have simply skipped as being “unreadable” or “too much effort to check properly”.

Not anymore – a quick scan of an article about an Indian company in Newsweek reveals several unfamiliar kanji: “製造” means “manufacture” (damn that’s one I learnt a long time ago but forgot!) and “拠点” means “a foothold”. Being able to read these kanji allows me to understand what the company does in detail – in this case it is a manufacturing company that recently gained a foothold in Thailand. In this way, the pen helps learners to increase their vocabulary (and in case you forget the word 5 minutes later, the pen can store up to 80 entries for quick reference.)

For intermediate and advanced learners of Japanese the benefits and pragmatism of the kanji reading pen are obvious. However, some of my other experiences apply to speakers of all levels. I remember when I first came to Japan having my telephone cut off; the reason being that I had thrown away my bills from NTT, believing them to be advertizing flyers (the postcard I got didn’t look like a bill to me after all!), whereas with the Kanji Reader it is easy to find out the purpose of household mail (and hence not throw bills in the trash…).

Other times I bring out the Kanji Reader are for reading people’s positions on business cards and reading restaurant menus. A lot of people have their name written in English on their meishi but their department and position often remain disguised in mysterious kanji. A quick scan reveals the difference between a company director and the president’s secretary. Likewise, using the pen at a restaurant can help make sure I choose the lamb and not the veal, or confirm that the dish doesn’t contain shellfish.

Overall the pen is highly recommended, mainly as a study tool, but also for practical everyday use. So next time you are flicking through a travel brochure eyeing up a cheap trip to Hawaii, whip out your kanji pen and make sure you understand the terms and conditions!

Kanji Reader

• Visit the Kanji Reader website to order online