justin․searls․co

The Ultimate Siri Shortcut for Japanese Learners

Merry Christmas! I made a little present for any of my fellow Japanese learners out there. 🎁

Today I'm pleased to share this ChatGPT-powered Shortcut for Apple platforms I've been working on with you.

Here are its headlining features of the Ingest Japanese shortcut:

  • Render Furigana - ChatGPT tokenizes words and produces readings for kanji and okurigana, which are then assembled into an HTML page with proper <ruby> and <rt> tags (copyable as an HTML file)
  • Show Kana Reading - ChatGPT tokenizes the words and converts them their kana pronunciations, separating each word with a space, so you can understand word boundaries at a glance
  • Translate to English - Uses whatever additional context has been provided to give an accurate translation of the text
  • Speak Aloud - Pronounces the selected text (copyable as an audio file)
  • Show Definitions - Generates dictionary definitions of each distinct word found in the text, highlighting the most likely meanings based on the surrounding context (copyable as an HTML file)

It also exposes these utilities:

  • Copy Input - copy whatever input you passed into the shortcut to your paste buffer
  • Copy Last Result - copy the result of the last operation (whether a string or a file)
  • Provide Additional Context - explain the situation or your goal in understanding the text so that ChatGPT will provide more useful translations and definitions
  • Add to Word List - Appends the selection and the dictionary-form of the words contained within it to a CSV file in your iCloud Drive's Shortcuts directory (see Shortcuts/ingest-japanese/word-list.csv)

Additionally, the Ingest Image companion shortcut uses ChatGPT to extract the image and analyze the surrounding context by either:

  • Passing in a photo, scan, or screenshot via a share sheet
  • Triggering the shortcut some other way, which will capture a screenshot of your screen

In either case, it will extract the selected or primary text it finds and forward it (as well as any additional circumstantial context present in the image) to Ingest Japanese so you can study it.

Installing

You can install and follow these shortcuts on RoutineHub. You can read more about them here:

I hope you check it out and find them useful in your studies!

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