A few people were having trouble on the Reviewing the Kanji Forums getting MeCab up and running, so I thought I’d make a little screencast and write up a quick install guide here. I’ll embed the video first and then installation notes and links can be found underneath.


The actual installation is actually quite simple. Go to http://code.google.com/p/mecab/downloads/detail?name=mecab-0.994.exe and download the executable there and run it.

When you come to the screen where you can pick the encoding the dictionary uses, choose shift-jis, as this will make the set-up a bit easier.

After it’s installed, open up your command-line prompt by typing “run” in the search bar of the start-up menu, hitting enter, and then typing “cmd” into the run bar.

In the command prompt, navigate to your Desktop and type in “MeCab.lnk” (you can type in mec and hit <tab> for auto-complete).

cd Desktop

MeCab.lnk

You can now enter Japanese and see the MeCab processing of it. For a more detailed explanation and troubleshooting, please see the video above.