Yomitan, a pop-up dictionary for language learning, 1 Year Development Update

It's been 1 year since we've released Yomitan stable, and since our last 6 month update we've done even more work to make Yomitan awesome for language learners. Here are some of the major development features we've shipped and talk about where Yomitan is heading next.

First, the numbers:

  • 60,000+ installs across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge
  • We've merged over 275 pull requests encompassing 48,000 lines of code
  • We've resolved 175 Github Issues
  • We've crossed 1000+ commits past our original fork of yomichan. Over 20% of commits are post-fork now

Major enhancements:

  • Clicking the deinflection rule now shows a small toaster with information about the conjugation rule (example img). Lyroxi painstakingly added robust descriptions for all the Japanese conjugation rules.
  • Yomitan now works with Microsoft Edge! Download it here
  • We created a documentation page for users at https://yomitan.wiki/
  • Added updatable dictionaries to receive updates to your favorite dictionaries (Jitendex supports this!)
  • Added recommended dictionaries for all languages that are installable on the Yomitan settings page without navigating away to download dictionary files (only properly sourced and licensed dictionaries included).
  • Added much more multi-language support, including support for languages with spaces, increased coverage of native audio, and a bunch of language-specific de-inflection logic.
  • Added support for aliasing your dictionaries, which allows you to rename your dictionaries on the popup.
  • Added full support for dark mode with option to align with system or browser settings.
  • Redid the action popup (popup that shows up when you click on the extension button) to be more user-friendly and indicate the active modifier key required for scanning.
  • Dozens of bug fixes 👐

With these changes we've made huge strides in goals 6 months ago: making yomitan more user-friendly in more languages.

Here's our hope for the next 6 months:

  • Reach 120k users of Yomitan. Having a large user base improves the chances that we have power users who can surface feedback to us, who can contribute to the Yomitan ecosystem (by creating dictionaries or improving our language-specific functionality), and who can ensure Yomitan continues to thrive in the forseeable future. We're already seeing some encouraging signs from people who are using Yomitan for non-Japanese languages and building tooling and dictionaries for those languages.
  • Continue to increase support for more languages and foster communities in these languages.
  • Improve the flashcard experience in Yomitan. Having the ability to add individual definitions, simplify the onboarding for setting up Anki, and potentially other features would make Yomitan even more powerful.
  • ???: Let us know where you would like Yomitan to be by filing a Github Issue or posting something here or in the Yomitan discord

Here's how you can help Yomitan succeed:

  • Install and use Yomitan (chrome, firefox, edge). We have a setup guide in yomitan.wiki. The more users who use Yomitan, the more feedback we get to decide what the bugs the community experiences and what to build next.
  • Share your experience using Yomitan with friends and internet friends. Yomitan is one of the most powerful pop-up dictionaries available, but its customizability s quite intimidating to many users. Helping other users discover and use Yomitan is what helped Yomitan get to where it is today.
  • File bug reports, UI/UX paper cuts, and feature requests in Github Issues or in the Yomitan discord server.
  • If you're a native or expert in a language, consider lending us your expertise by adding support to a particular language. We have a guide for contributing language features to Yomitan.
  • Read our CONTRIBUTING.md doc on how to contribute code to Yomitan.

I and other maintainers will be around the next couple of days to answer any questions in the comment section here.