Learn Japanese Today

You can visit Denshi Jisho at jisho.org.

Some things are just simpler, and easier-to-use versions of other things in a way that makes them immensely successful. Macs did this to PCs, Google to other search engines and the list goes on. You can’t build a better mousetrap, but you can build one with less packaging and less time to setup.

This is essentially what Jisho.org did for Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC dictionary . Jisho.org, also called Denshi Jisho, even uses the same definition files as WWWJDIC, so you know your information is accurate, it just uses the search better and is overall more user friendly.

Ease of Use: 9

The search box for WWWJDIC is intimidating, and fails to highlight the options that are really important. Denshi Jisho trims down the extra stuff you don’t need and leaves you with the three most important options: which dictionary you look in, common words only, and kana/romaji.

The most important of these is “Common Words only,” which is a button that is not made obvious enough on WWWJDIC, and is a button you’ll want to press on 95% of searches. The times when the “Common Word” is not the one you want are few and far between.

Other than that, the site lets you type in Japanese words in romaji, look up kanji by running your mouse over the character, and see sample sentences with the word you looked up with one easy click. Easy. Convenient.

Authenticity: 7

Denshi Jisho has a similar problem to WWWJDIC of not always having the ideal word float to the top, especially if “Common Words Only” isn’t selected. You usually have to scroll down a bit to find a definition that seems appropriate.

However, the example sentences used on DJ are easy to access and well edited, providing a good sense of context. Before you use a word in a paper, look at the sample sentences to see if they make sense.

Quantity of Knowledge: 10

Denshi Jisho has all the words from Jim Breen’s dictionary, with the addition of kanji information from other sources. Lots of good stuff.

Price: 10

Ever so free.

Fun: 7

Denshi Jisho is still a dictionary, so you won’t believe me if I tell you it’s too fun. But you get results quickly and there are interesting sample sentences to read, even some funny ones. DJ is far from the mind-numbing despair I get from WWWJDIC.

Overall: 8.7

Although there is room for improvement, mainly in kanji lookup and the order of words that show up on a search, Denshi Jisho is currently my favorite online dictionary. You get all the knowledge of WWWJDIC without the hassle. I recommend.

When writing my review of Furigana yesterday, I realized I always perform the same test as soon as I get a new dictionary, and I though I’d share it with you.

I call it “The Public Test.” It originated from my end of term paper this past spring, when I was writing about Japanese bathing customs. I wrote a lot about 銭湯 (sentou), Japanese public baths, and I had a terrible time figuring out all the correct contexts for the myriad ways to say public in Japanese. I was using a few crappy dictionaries, online and in print, because I couldn’t find my good one, and it was a real pain. Of course, the dictionary I normally use gave me pretty straight answers once I finally found it, so I decided it was a good test to figure out if a dictionary is worth its salt.

Essentially, a good dictionary should correctly distinguish most, if not all of the following words and give you a decent idea of when to use them:

公衆 (koushuu), 大衆 (taishuu): The general public. As in, “The general public still don’t know about the scandal”

公の(ooyake no),公共の(koukyou no):  Common, communal, non-private. These all mean basically the same thing to my knowledge, if you know any furthur intricacies, leave a comment.

公衆の(koushuu no): For public use. A public telephone is a 公衆電話 (koushuu denwa)

公開 (koukai): Open to the public. For example, a government building might be koukai on Thursdays.

公然 (kouzen): Open (as opposed to secret), public knowledge. Add と to mean, “in public”. Urinating in public would be 公然と放尿 (kouzen to hounyou)

公立 (kouritsu): Government-established, generally used for institutions like public libraries (kouritsu toshokan) and public schools (kouritsu gakkou).

人前で (hito mae de): In front of people. The way we generally use public in the term public speaking.

As you can see, these words are all very different, stemming from the same original English word, “public.” A good dictionary should be aware that it’s not always a one-for-one exchange between languages. Try giving this test to a dictionary yourself. It doesn’t clear up all problems, but it does clear up most.

Today we’ll be taking a look at Kodansha’s Furigana dictionary. This review was the suggestion of my high school classmate Bento (nickname of my creation that he bears to this day). He’s spent some time in Japan, and he really wanted me to review this dictionary, which he often used instead of an electronic one. But also, if any of you loyal readers have an idea of something I should review, send me an e-mail at ongakun@gmail.com. I’d love to hear your ideas. Also if you have made or are working on some sort of Japanese learning material, I’d love to do a review to help you get the word out. I can’t promise it will be a favorable one (ask Khatzumoto ), but I can promise it will be fair.

On to the review, I mainly use Furigana for English to Japanese stuff, so that’s mostly what the review will focus on.

Ease of Use:8.5

Furigana (shown below) are the tiny hiragana that are written on top of a kanji to show its reading in case you don’t know the kanji.

This dictionary gets its name by having furigana for every kanji in every entry, which makes it incredibly useful as a beginner to intermediate dictionary. It kind of sucks to have to look up a word, and then look up a kanji right afterward. The book has pretty large type and a lot of spacing, which generally makes it pretty easy to find a word on the page. However, the large print also creates the problem of having you turning lots of pages to find your word. This dictionary can be bought in separate volumes for English to Japanese and Japanese to English, or one big volume. I have the two smaller ones, but they still share the common problem with the larger one in that they are an awkward size. The half-volumes are almost pocket-sized, but they’re a little too big and a little too thick to fit in your pocket, making them kind of convenient, but also an awkward size. I think the size of the dictionary is really my biggest complaint. Too big for your pocket, small enough to get awkwardly jammed to the bottom of your  backpack. But wait, I almost forgot, an amazing quality of this dictionary not shared by most other paperback dictionaries. It stays open on a flat surface by itself. I can’t stress enough how important this is, especially for a dictionary. It’s really frustrating to have to hold open a dictionary with  one hand while you try to type the word with the other. Furigana does it right.

Authenticity: 10

What this dictionary does a lot better than its counterparts is providing appropriate context for a word. The reason Bento really wanted me to write a review of this dictionary was because of the boatload of example sentences provided in each entry. This dictionary would be a great source for sentences to study if you follow 10,000 sentences program over at AJATT . Additionally, this dictionary, unlike some others, does not shy away from grammar and conjugations. In a lot of dictionaries, if you look up “probable” you’ll just find the word 多分 (tabun), which is correct, but this dictionary also tells you that you can change the end of the sentence to deshou or darou to achieve the same effect, and the example sentences show you that when you use tabun, you should almost always use deshou or darou at the end. It’s good stuff.

Quantity of Knowledge:8.5

There aren’t the ridiculous amount of entries boasted by WWWJDIC in this one, but each entry is brimming with knowledge. There are multiple definitions and different sample sentences for each definition and different contexts for each definition. I just opened it up to a random page and found the entry for “keep,” a word with multiple uses in English. There are 28 example sentences split over 16 definitions. It’s unbelievable. If the word you’re looking for is in there, you will not close the book unhappy. However, I do want to reiterate that this is a great Beginner-Intermediate dictionary. You will ougrow it.

Price: 7

The full dictionary goes for about $40, while the halves go for about 20 apiece. Not the cheapest dictionary you can buy, but far from the most expensive. And when you consider the added learning benifits from all the example sentences, you really aren’t paying for just a dictionary.

Fun:9

I generally get pretty excited to look something up in this dictionary. The example sentences provide great learning opportunities, and some of them are pretty funny. As dictionaries go, this is one of the more fun ones.

Overall: 9

Without going into the hundreds of dollars for a really good electric dictionary, you can’t get much better than this for a beginning to intermediate dictionary. That being said, the limited scope will sometimes send you looking elsewhere, but generally if you’re looking for one of the 14,000 entries in the book, odds are you’ll be satisfied. I really like this one, thanks Bento!

If you’ve been swayed by my review and can’t live without dictionary, click here

Today we’ll be taking a look at one of the internet’s largest and most popular Japanese dictionaries, WWWJDIC . This dictionary was created by Jim Breen of Australia’s Monash University, and is the web’s authority for Japanese word look-up. Without furthur ado, let’s go to the review.

Ease of Use: 6

This dictionary has easily twice as much info as any other on the web, but getting to it is another story. I tried to find the word 楽しい(tanoshii), by typing in its definition of ‘fun’. These were some of the results I got:

興味索然 【きょうみさくぜん】 (adj-t,adv-to) uninteresting; tending to spoil the fun (pleasure) (of); throwing a wet blanket (on)
茶化す 【ちゃかす】 (v5s) to poke fun at; to make fun of 
ファンファール(P); ファンファーレ (n) (1) fanfare (ger:); flourish of trumpets; (2) fun fair;

The list goes on, but the target word, tanoshii, does not appear until the twentieth entry. Checking the box marked ‘Common words’ brings it up to the 9th entry, and only by also checking the ‘Exact word-match’ box does it become the second entry. You would think they would put the most common and exact matches at the top, but that’s just not how this dictionary rolls. Typing in a Japanese word and searching for its english definition is much more effective than the other direction, but I find myself looking for a Japanese word much more often. Also, the kanji-finder seems needlessly complex and always takes me a while to use. The Japanese reading tool and hand-written kanji finder are pretty efficient, but they aren’t the main focus of the dictionary.

Authenticity: 6

This dictionary will always have the right word somewhere, but it won’t tell you which one it is, leaving you to find it yourself. Let’s look back at the example of tanoshii, even after I checked the boxes for ‘Common words’ and ‘exact word-match’ it was still only the second entry, the first was this:

ファン (n) (1) fan; (2) fun;

If there’s one surefire way to have a Japanese person think you don’t know Japanese, its to speak in katakana phonetic conversions like the one above aka (dog = ドッグ(doggu)、cat = カット(katto)). ファン is an acceptable word for ‘fan’, as in ’sports fan.’ It is not really an acceptable word for fun, and certainly not if you’re trying to convince people you know Japanese. Finding the right word in this dictionary basically requires you to know the right word.

Quantity of Knowledge: 10

You just can’t argue with this one. There are so many entries, most of which are equipped with example sentences and conjigations. On top of that is a reading tool, kanji dictionary, and even a dictionary you can use from your cell phone. If you can’t find a word in a smaller dictionary, odds are it will be here. This is a good last resort.

Price: 10 (free)

Yes, it’s free, but the 10 score is assuming you don’t put a price on your time. It takes a while to get what you want out of this beast.

Fun: 2

I know dictionaries aren’t supposed to be fun, but using WWWJDIC frequently puts me in a bad mood. Sometimes I find what I’m looking for right  away, but other times it makes me wish for a less thorough dictionary. Again, most of the other tools aren’t as frustrating as the English-Japanese, but that’s the one I usually use.

Overall: 6.5

I have to give credit where credit is due because of the ridiculous amount of stuff you can find at WWWJDIC, but because its so difficult to use, I’d really recommend it only for obscure words that you know aren’t commonly used.