Jisho

After the new version came out I stuck with the classic because it's just ... better. I much prefer the separated search boxes so you could really get what you are after. If you need the Japanese word for Sun, just type it in the English word box (now you have to type it in and then click the link to say that you were actually looking for Sun and not すん. I don't even know how searching for example sentences on the new version works.

Did I miss something? Where is there something about new versions or classic versions.

Signed up just to say this pretty much. Have been using classic ever since it became classic. The new UI is just hot web 3.0 garbage that's obviously designed for smartphone trash.

Sad to see yet another website kill off a good desktop interface for something far more annoying to use, but hopefully someone can just re-host it maybe.

ive been using jisho for 4 years. it's been like this ever since... is there somehow a different version I dont know about?

@Lyza yeah... no idea.

Ah, found it.

http://classic.jisho.org/

I see... people just being picky :)

@Kimtaro

Oh wow, didn't expect the actual dev in here. No offense to this site in particular, I just find most all modern sites designed for touch-devices in mind (with extra whitespace/unnecessary fancy rendering graphics/etc) to be a great leap backwards from the simple, fast-rendering pages of the past like classic.

That less lean UI, combined with a ever so slightly slower to respond UI (at least in the radical search menu which is what I use most of the time), and ""modern"" design elements like needing to click 'more' to show all kanji with matching radicals when there are many results instead of having it all on one nice page, is just a step backward for me. It's not just this site of course though, I understand with the rise of touch-devices like smartphones in the past decade that designers of course want to tailor their sites to those devices which have ever so regrettably become the majority on the internet.

You have my thanks for maintaining it this long of course and giving me this tool I've used for so many years, and no one can blame you for not maintaining something that's doubtlessly 1-5% or so of your traffic these days. And thank you greatly for open-sourcing classic, I'll probably just end up running a local instance of it then (guess it'll be even faster too :P).

@TheTripod why is it "regrettable" that I can study Japanese on the train, or anywhere I don't want to lug my desktop tower around.

@Leebo

Mainly because as mentioned a) such mobile-oriented look (comparatively) trash on a desktop workstation where one generally can work much more efficiently and b) they basically all render slower than a simple web 1.0 UI interface thanks to the fancy dynamic elements they love shoving into pages these days.

It wouldn't be an issue if developers didn't drop the actual desktop interface while catering to the iToddlers and the such at the same time, but due to time/cost issues of course that is the regrettable direction the internet is heading in these days with dumbed-down, slower interfaces everywhere designed for some 5" screen.

Again, don't really see why studying or working on the go makes someone an "iToddler" but I don't think we'll see eye to eye on it, so I'll drop it.

Never said working on the go on a mobile device is inherently wrong. Again the issue is when everything is re-designed to cater to those mobile device displays and input methods, bringing down the usability and efficiency of everyone else on actual workstations.

Such a shame classic is going away and all those years the issues of the new UI hasn't been adressed. Admittedly I don't know much about running a website and its expense/income balance, but if the only reason Classic is shutting down is not being updated, I don't think that's an issue to be honest. It works, and it works better than the new one IMO.

Let me illustrate the disadvantages of the new UI by an example.

I saw this announcement when I wanted to look at how the character 裏 was properly written.

1) In the old version when I write Ura, I can see 13 results without scrolling the page. This is an important feature considering how common it is to have different words having the same reading in japanese. In the new version, I can only see one result without scrolling. If the first result isn't the one you're looking for, you cannot take a quick look at results, you need to scroll one by one.

2) As I said, I was looking for the writing method. In the old version, I have immediate access links to relevant pages (Kanji details, or sentences). In the new version, I have to go through the meaning (which is irrelevant for me at the moment) and click "details", to be presented with... the exact same information? (Why?) I have the Kanji on the right now, which I have to click on details, again.

3) Okay, we're on the Kanji page for 裏 finally. In the old version, I can see the whole process of how it is written in a single image. In the new version, I have to scroll again to see the whole process. The image itself also look aliased (jaggy lines) which is unpleasant and looks amateurish.

I hope the UI could be improved taking into account these inefficiencies, although I'm sorry to say that my hopes aren't high since the design doesn't seem to be changed in the slightest since the downgrade in 2015. Not all people study Japanese in the train as a stimuli for passing time, so the UI should not be pure mobile oriented, which is 100% that way right now. I like to take my pen and paper sometimes, and being distracted from your study subject fighting the UI, having to scroll so often when you are only utilizing 1/3 of the screen available is not good design.

@Sitensis you can get directly to the kanji page by using the kanji tag when you search. Yeah, I guess you have to scroll when you get to that page if you're on mobile, but it sounded like you're not on mobile, so I'm not sure what the problem is. On desktop you can immediately get from the homepage to seeing the diagram for writing 裏 in one click.

Also, if you're not familiar with what it takes to run a website, it seems strange to just assume that there's no justification for retiring the classic version. Honestly, I'm surprised he keeps the site up at all, seeing as it's just a side project, and mostly thankless task (though you do get the occasional person to come by and say it's garbage apparently.)

Hello!
I signed up here just to comment, since I just saw the announcement on classic.jisho.
I have been using classic jisho for over 10 years and not even once had I thought about switching to new version. As many already said before, there are so many disadvantages on new website and it is so much less convenient to use, compared to old version. I always recommended my students to use the classic version, too. I feel truly sad to hear, that it will be suddenly gone and I can't imagine switching to new version after all these years. If the only problem is that the classic version is not up to date, I really don't see any reason to let go of it. I hope that after seeing that there are still people who need and cherish classic version, admin will reconsider or someone else will take it up. OR at least the new website will get improved UI.
Also thank you for the past 10 years that I spent on classic.jisho almost everyday, I wouldn't be where I am now without this website. It was fun while it lasted.

I've been using jisho for something like a decade, and it's always heart-wrenching to see a beloved tool, one that made you sharper and wiser and better, vanish into nothingness. What is even sadder is that new people will never get to experience the demure perfection it had, and if you ever try to explain it to them, they wouldn't understand and would think you a nostalgic old fool.

You take away jisho now as is your right, but think of the future: what was so great about jisho? The compacity. How hard will it be to make an alternate view (like how some site can sort either by grid or lines)? switch the portrait display to landscape, remove white spaces, use a smaller font, make details like example sentences optional through a tickbox in the settings (like rikaichamp had), while at it make it possible to choose which dictionary (words or kanji) you want to browse, this way either info won't cramp up the space of the other, and voila, old jisho can keep existing with a new code.

Thank you for all these year. ;_;

Classic Jisho is a great tool, and I personally dislike the new Jisho.org layout and bright colours. New Jisho is certainly pretty, and has great content, but it is very inconvenient to use, with huge amounts of large space which takes too much time to parse and scroll down.
It is quite a pain to search for sentences in new Jisho, as opposed to the clear lines in Classic Jisho.
Classic Jisho is a great tool, I've been using it since 2011, and have no problem finding everything I need there (I use it all the time!!!).
Would it be a problem to leave Classic Jisho as it is, even if it's not up to date?

i've used classic.jisho.org for a good amount of translation work (alongside linguee and native japanese dictionaries); the ease of referencing the sentence corpus and the amount of results displayed on the screen at one time has always made it my go-to, even after the introduction of the newer site. It's much more efficient, basic and streamlined, like a lot of modern japanese sites still are (yahoo.com vs yahoo.co.jp, for example).

sorry to double post, but there's another reason why the amount of vocabulary information displayed at once per page is an advantage for classic.

say you're referencing a physical book, and can't copy-paste. if a long technical term comes up, with unfamiliar kanji, on the classic jisho site you might just construct the first one or two characters from the radical builder and then scroll until you find the word. this takes a lot longer to do on the new site- as it prioritizes a greater depth of information displayed on individual dictionary entries. the classic site emphasizes quantity of entries.

eventually you do start to memorize the locations of the radicals in the chart, but classic jisho is still faster in this situation, and involves less squinting.

I created a search in Chrome that already marked the option "Kana as romaji" so that I could see in Romaji, how do I do this on the current site?
by Google Translate

If I search for a word on classic, I can see lots of entries at once, but on this version only 2 or 3 results fit on my screen at a time due to massive amount of empty wasted space around everything.

So much this. I've retained classic this long because I used jisho as a, uh, jisho. I totally get not maintaining ancient tech stack, and I knew it would have to go away at some point, but I kept hoping some kind of compact mode would be implemented to provide a more list-like output, or some kind of API that would let me do it for myself.

This is classic jisho in a Vivaldi windowed tab, where I use 4 panes to let me use 4 different translation resources in a window:

https://files.catbox.moe/k3jivz.png

This is jisho.org with the same search at the default display size:

https://files.catbox.moe/84yfot.png

This is jisho.org font zoomed to display the same number of non-name entries (which I didn't ask for):

https://files.catbox.moe/x0g1gk.png

Here is the Apple Dictionary rendering of the Super Daijirin search in roughly the same window size:

https://files.catbox.moe/szxa3r.png

The redesign was a huge step backwards in info density. I get that it was also intended to be mobile friendly, and I'm not going to include another example here, but on an iphone 7 it shows exactly one entry without scrolling.

I hate to criticize the site because it is in most respects a much more capable application. It's also not like any other online edict lookup is any better now (thanks, Bootstrap!) although none use quite as much whitespace as jisho.org.

Classic was pretty much the most compact, info-dense edict lookup site on the Internet, which is why I used it so long. Needless to say, I'm sorry to see it go, ironically the new winner is any of several Japanese E-J lookup sites because lol Japanese web design still in Heisei era. But here's my wish on my way out the door for some kind of "Classic mode" that would provide a list-like compact display like old Classic Jisho. And thanks for all the fish.

Hi everyone. Jim Breen here.

While I can understand that some people are concerned over the loss of the classic version of jisho, the key point, as Kimtaro wrote, is: "the data is over 10 years old at this point, and there have been countless updates and fixes to the dictionary data since then that is not reflected on that site. It is simply not good to keep running a site that presents outdated and in many cases wrong data."

I am the one on the receiving end of complaints about amendments not appearing, entries being out-of-date, etc. etc. Once I realised that some of the complaints related to what people were seeing on the classic jisho version, I contacted Kim.

Yeah, I just tried searching for 拡散希望 on the classic site, since I figured it was something that was probably added more recently than 10 years ago. It wasn't on the classic version, but it was on the current version.

People who want Kimtaro to keep the classic version around are really okay with it not being updated? A few people have said that. The look of the site is more important to you than the content being accurate and up-to-date? That's just strange to me.

The new UI is that unusable to some people Leebo, accuracy of data doesn't matter if it's ultimately unusable. Even after ten years I imagine 99% of classic jisho data is still accurate, because the language itself hasn't changed that much. Really sad to hear people complaining to Jim though, and of course it's not the kind of problem that would go away even if you added an "outdated" disclaimer on classic. That said it's quite frustrating to imagine jisho closing over complaints when it's praised and used by so many people.

I'm sure Kimtaro knows how many people are using it. So far we do know it's at least ten or so people, so that's something.

The vast majority of words that any learner will ever need is in Classic Jisho.
Sorry to insist on this, but it is not really an issue that Classic is not up-to-date: there are warnings and links to new Jisho every where in Classic. Users not happy with Classic, can use new Jisho.

However, if Classic Jisho users are happy with it, and NOT happy with new Jisho, why remove Classic?

Could you please just leave Classic as it is for those users who have different accessibility needs (like myself), for whom new Jisho poses a barrier due to the extra need for typing and scrolling etc.

I use jisho personally to help me read manga and check stroke order and such and everything I need is on the classic site since jp hasn't really changed much. The vast, vast majority is the same.

If the only issue is thinking it's out-of-date, surely you can just put a clear notice at the top saying it's no longer being updated and recommending this version for educational use?

I can see that being a big deal for more professional stuff, but for hobby use classic is a lot better due to the better searching and much quicker to parse dictionary-like design that can have many entries on screen at a time. It's just an outright faster site to use. There's no need to remove the site altogether when it's easier and faster to use than the new one aside from lack of drawing.

New words are not the only kind of updates that have been made to the various databases. It's not unusual for things that were outright incorrect to be updated. We get requests for mistaken dictionary entries to get updated on the forum all the time. The language didn't change, but the fallible people putting the database content together fixed a mistake.

People saying "well, it's 99% okay now so that's fine" are 1) guessing at the number and 2) not acknowleding that that percentage can only go down as time moves on.

If the data in Classic Jisho is around 10 years old as Kim says above, the JMdict file has grown from around around 150k to 192k entries in that time. Around 5000 incorrect or otherwise bad entries were also deleted during the same time span, so we're talking about a 30% (!) increase in good, trustworthy entries. JMdict is continuously updated every single day, not just with new entries but also with corrections and other improvements of old entries (and those updates make it over to "New Jisho" with max a small 2-3 day delay). To use Classic just because you prefer that design would really be doing yourself a big disservice.

@ Leebo & MarcusR

All the strengths of the current site still don't outweigh the some of the advantages of the more simple and dense classic format, for a lot of people and for a lot of applications. Of course not for everyone- and no one is arguing that classic is the more comprehensive dictionary out of the two versions.

There's a particular feature of the old site that I do miss with the new version: the ability to click on individual words in the sentence corpus as hyperlinks leading to their respective dictionary entries. Of course, this is an automated thing and sometimes the words may be parsed incorrectly, mostly when there is a long stretch of hiragana. I don't think there's much of a way to fix that.

But with the new site you need to manually copy-paste a word you want the definition of from the sentence, into the search box, having to scroll back up to the top of the page.

And if that word is a part of a phrase that has its own distinct jisho entry, where the same word takes on a slightly different meaning compared to itself in isolation, you might miss the better definition- especially if the phrase entry is too far down the page.

On the classic sentence page, on the other hand, the longest possibly sequence of a given selection of characters will always be the hyperlink. It is just faster to get to the pertinent information.

Just like having more entries on one page can make it faster to find the one you're looking for, oftentimes, as well as showing the reader a greater selection of related words, which for an agglutination language provides a good deal of context, and can be more educational than the same space taken up by a wikipedia entry.

@raishinpu: "Even after ten years I imagine 99% of classic jisho data is still accurate, because the language itself hasn't changed that much. "

That's assuming all the JMdict data was perfect and entirely complete in 2011, which of course it wasn't. It still isn't, of course, but it's improved a whole lot. Let me try and qualify that with some more numbers: in addition to the almost 50,000 new entries not in Classic Jisho, around 35-40% of the remaining older entries have been updated at least once in the past 10 years. The entry "掛ける" has been refined/updated a whopping 19 times!

@jishoborg probably put it best, the info density is just quite a step down.

If anyone cares also, someone has actually been kind enough to make a userscript for nu-Jisho to make it a bit more compact (but not quite classic jisho still). It's available here: https://rentry.org/p4gpw/raw#.user.js

Wow, I had no idea that classic and current jisho.org were accessing two different bodies of data. All this time had I assumed that the UI was the only difference. (As a side note, I'm interested in how you even accomplish that; did you clone the database ten years ago and use that instead of the 'live' one?)

So, I support your decision to remove it the old version.

That said, I am also someone who preferred the classic UI.

So! Rather than beg to keep classic around, I'll support your decision to try and continually improve the new jisho's UI. In addition to the many UI complaints already stated, here are some additional thoughts not yet mentioned in this thread:

(1) Put the link to the page that describes all the search options in a more prominent place.
I had no idea you could search with #common, #kanji etc. until I read it today in this forum thread. I honestly thought that you couldn't filter 'common words only' anymore in the new UI, it's one reason I kept using the old one. So make these more well known!
(Apparently it's on the main page of jisho.org. But with jisho.org pinned, I basically never see the 'front' page, I just see the previous result and search again from there. So something near the search bar on the results page(s) needs to let users know these hashtag options are available; knowing these makes the new UI usable again.)

(2) having the parallel English and Japanese search boxes was helpful because you could put data in both fields before searching.

For example: If I'm trying to remember that word for 'hometown,' was it しゅしん、しゅっしん、しゅうしん, or something else? Due to the way the entry is written, none of those words come up when I search for 'hometown' alone.

The solution was to give hints in both the English and Japanese fields. Since I know it starts with しゅ, so I'll type 'shu' into the Japanese search bar and 'town' into the English search bar. Sure enough that word I was trying to think of is among the results.
(Incidentally it's 出身, and it turns out that the person who taught it to me as 'hometown' wasn't quite using it correctly either. But with the dual search bars, I was still able to find it!)
So, maybe have a button there to bring up separate search fields for the people who want it that way and for those times when it's useful (as above). Maybe the button would toggle between the separated bars and the unified bar.

Thank you so much for being responsive to user feedback. I hope these suggestions are helpful, and best wishes as you continue to develop the site!

First:
I hate having to memorize hashtags, it's much better to just click a checkbox.
Second:
How do I do this search on the new site?
http://classic.jisho.org/words?jap=ai&eng=love&dict=edict&romaji=on
by Google Translate

@John_Chow_Seymour

When you click on "All" button on the left to the search bar, you see the most common options (including "#common" directly available as buttons). Then there's also a link to the full list. The start page is also not the full list, so if you want to see all search options then go to the page that is linked there ( https://jisho.org/docs )

You can also just search for "home しゅ" or "しゅ home" to get the behavior you want. No need to have separate search bars.

@Jaraya You can search for "あい love #romaji"

fyi, this one is crashing half the time when I'm searching for words. I'm also a guy that was stuck to using classic for a while

@deeteecee you're saying that current Jisho crashes your browser? I've never seen that happen.

I've been using classic Jisho since I first started studying Japanese nearly a decade ago, and one thing that I really appreciate about classic Jisho is information density. I can see 15 different search results that I can click into for more details on if I need them, whereas on new Jisho I can see one or two entries in the same amount of space. At this point in my studies, I use jisho not for definitions, but for finding words that I encounter while reading something I can't copy-paste that I may not be able to type all the kanji for (such as a really tiny or blurry word in a volume of manga, or a word in a novel where I don't know any readings for one or more of its kanji). In most cases, I can use the kanji by radicals feature to find kanji like that (both classic and new jisho are good for this), but in cases where I can't, I may have to scroll through many pages of jisho results to find the word I'm looking for. This is a really useful advantage that classic has over new when looking for jukugo because I can scroll through entries much more quickly. Would you consider implementing something like that in the future on new jisho, where users can choose to display leaner search results in favor of seeing more of them on the screen at once?

I understand that the old site has to go at some point. I'm rather thankful it stayed up as long as it has. But I completely agree with OP's assessment of the new site, which kept me using the classic version. I'd really appreaciate it if a proper desktop view could be added that is a compact table and makes better use of horizontal space.

Remembered that userscripts are a thing so went looking for one for jisho.org that did some reformatting; there are a number of them on Greasyfork, but none that were sufficiently classic.

So I made one to somewhat replicate the Classic layout. It's not as compact as the original, since I decided to retain current Jisho's large kanji word size. Classic's compromise of the hover over with a larger display was pretty much ideal in my opinion. If I feel more ambitious I may replicate this behavior later and reduce the default word size, but this will involve adjusting the furi as well.

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/433871-jisho-org-jisho-modo

This userscript only is applied at the main Search page, if you click on the Details for an entry, you have the full New Jisho experience. Only tested with Blink, if someone has issues with a Gecko or Webkit browser, lemme know.

Anyway. FWIW.

https://files.catbox.moe/2d5tmn.png
https://files.catbox.moe/g3ganz.png

No clue why people like the older one. I usually like classic looking websites, but the classic site is a bit too cluttered, plus the Kanji are way too small. Also the design on the newer one is a lot more centered, so it makes it easier to read. Definitely prefer the current design over the old one. People complaining about things like search clearly haven't even attempted to figure out how to use search. If you want to find a certain word in English just use #noun, otherwise type in the romaji to get the Japanese version. It's not hard to understand at all. I think any dictionary site should focus on readability which the old one didn't, personal preference to how the layout is really doesn't matter when it comes a site like this.

Can't you at LEAST put the variant kanji on the results page like in the Classic Jisho? I like to go over pre-1946 works and the old feature showing variants is extremely helpful to me.

For instance, if I build 観 in the new jisho, I do not get any variation results; however, in classic, 觀 pops up as a variant. Often more than one kyūjitai variant.

Thanks for listening.
-- Guy

観測鏡

@jishoborg Pretty nice!

I thought about rehosting the classic but it's too unfamiliar. I decided to try to re-implement a very barebones version (only Words and Sentences) with a few improvements (up-to-date data, better sorting, better romaji, dark mode). If it works out it might be a workable replacement for some of the 0.3% that prefer classic.

@jishoborg
I've tried the script in chromium and firefox, not looking that way for me. unless the blue lines and widening are something separate?

@imomushiro So Greasyfork's automated license violation sweeper decided that my script was too similar to another jisho.org reformatter and apparently pointed my script link at this other script. So you were getting the other script.

Since I failed to convince them that my script is, like, totally different, I've rehosted it at Github:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/runrunrirun/jisho-fix/master/jisho-fix.js

You should be able to "Load by URL" or equivalent in your greasemonkey equivalent. I tested it with Violentmonkey and on both Firefox and Chrome this time, and it appears to work the same in either.

Also fixed a fairly major problem in that it erased results when using the #names and #sentences hashes. Jisho.org is a fairly complicated beast under the hood, my hat's off to Kim & Co. in making it as fast as it is...

After countless years I must say goodbuy to the classic Jisho. I kept using that site because it uses full screen for desktop users. The use of colors making it easy to read. And you have to click less. To see the stroke writing you have 1 click on the old website and need 2 clicks on the new website, and most of the time side scrolling.
As others mentoned, I'm one of the older users that don't like the waste of space on new websites. I like most information on 1 screen. Desktop users have different needs.
Goodby magnificient classic jisho that served me such a long time during studies.

@jishoborg
Finally tested your script and the result is superb. Thank you very much for allowing me to continue diving into the Japanese language.