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For Korean words it’s sometimes hard to find a decent dictionary. Many start with google or bing translate and throw in entire sentences.

You probably already experienced that this doesn’t work. Luckely, naver.com has build a great ENGLISH dictionary, which also works well the other way around! It’s seems to have the YBM dictionary and it’s extended with other translated texts. It’s great for finding words and sometimes whole sentences. Just read the words carefully so you know what you are picking out.

After some exensive use (mostly in class), we got a bit annoyed because the naver.com website does not support mobile browsers. So for the time being, we build a small modification and put it on our site. We present: /dictionary!

Just visit this link on your mobile and put it on your desktop! Enjoy!

On hover translation:

You can learn a language from a textbook, but having real conversations speeds up your learning efforts a lot. This is why I decided to change the primary language of my computer to Korean. Now, most websites and programs greet me in Korean, and I read and interact a whole lot more!

However, I noticed that I seldomly look up new words, slowing down my work and thus became frustrated with my latest language experiment.

I found that many of my Korean friends use windows PC’s, which provide real time translation of the word they point at with their mouse. Holy moly, that’s amazing! This is very useful because you read the active word and can see a active translation in a small on-screen widget. You are forced to think in the foreign language first, then you have your dictionary immediately ready to refer to. They tell me they learn English quickly using this system, i’m jealous!

I had been looking for an app for macintosh OSX for some time but without luck, until I came across TranslateIt! today. It’s exactly what I had been looking for! Let me show you an example:

OSX programs including Finder:

and web browsing:

How to set it up:

1. Download and install the translateit! app from their website. (I choose without popular dictionaries)

2. Download a dictionary, i got this one but there are many mentioned on the translateit website. (bottom)

3. locate the downloaded dictionary by clicking ‘dictionary’ -> ‘+’ and then ‘install from local directory’.

4. Lastly, change your primary language to korean (한국어) and restart/relogin to your MAC OSX account.

Done!

PS: we are not affiliated by creator of the translatit! program, or the dictionary. We just think it’s awesome!