Playing VNs with Translation Aggregator and ITH for those who know Japanese but not Kanji

I'm going to be blunt... if you don't know some Japanese, you are screwed when trying to play an untranslated VN.  Relying on Atlas or any other machine translation to feed your addiction is like drinking homemade grain alcohol because you got bored of the microbrewed stuff you get from your friend next door... it's a recipe for pain and general confusion.

However, for those of you that have a basic knowledge of Japanese but don't know enough kanji (the massive non-phonetic symbol alphabet used in Japan and China) to be useful, Translation Aggregator with Jparser and the Interactive Text Hooker are your salvation. 

Here is how it works.

1- Download both ITH and Translation Aggregator

2- First set up Translation Aggregator (starting it as Administrator in Vista or Windows 7), making sure you have the JParser plug-in and the edict dictionary for it  (edict is the best one I've come across so far for this use)

3-Eliminate all the windows on Translation Aggregator except JParser and use the wrench-like icon to configure it.  Set the furigana to your preference (personally recommend romaji at first for how easy it is)

4-Start ITH as Administrator (to make this easy, just go into properties and set it so that you always start it as Administrator).  Make sure you set the options so that it copies text to the clipboard

5- Start the game you want to play

6- Press the process button, find the game application, and attach ITH to it, setting up a profile if you want it to attach automatically when you start the game later.

7- When the game displays its first text after attaching ITH, search through the threads for one whose content contains the entirety of the line

        7 (cont)- At times, a game will split its lines into several threads.  When this happens you use the thread function at the top of the ITH window after finding a thread that contains the missing text and look for a small icon on the menu saying 'link to'.  Once you've found this, press it and it will display the numbers of the existing threads other than the one you are currently on.  You then choose the main thread and press 'set' and 'ok'.  As a result, all input from this thread will go into the main one. With some games this can be a rather annoying process, repeated multiple times.  Unfortunately, there is little you can do about this.

      7 (cont2)- If you find that no hook shows up, download the ITH updater and update your version, and if that doesn't work, go looking for an agth code and input it to create a new hook for the game.  In ITH 3, you cannot record this in your profiles for games, though in ITH 2.3 you can.  For this reason, I recommend having both on your computer so you can use either or as necessary.  If you need to switch between versions of ITH, be certain to close down the game you are playing first, as the program will frequently not allow you to start the other version while a game you attached the other version to is on.

8-  A caution to those using Jparser.  Usages of romanization in JParser can be odd, and they are often wrong for the word in question.  However, context will serve you well in changing the romanization in your head to something you will recognize.  In particular the 'understand/minute', 'head', and 'sound' kanji are ones that will frequently pop up incorrectly used (though there are a lot of others).  The 'understand' kanji as it is said in 'wakaru' is also the same kanji for 'minute' or 'bun'.  Watch out for confusing kanji like that and eventually you will start automatically converting them in your head.  Until you can do that, I suggest sticking to chara-ge as much as possible, for their ease of comprehension and translation.  I started with Jingai Makyou as my first game, and I still remember how much 'fun' I had trying to convert all those odd kanji usages into comprehensible Japanese.