Well, with all due respect, you guys may be the ultimate experts, but when I taught *English* to hundreds of Japanese students, I have seen first hand what it means to take thousands of words out of context. As far as I am concerned, jisho.org and the WWWDict project are the best electronic resources out there, but, time and again they have failed to guide me to a precise meaning in terms of mood, formality, or common usage. Not so with paper dictionaries--not even with
Oxford's Pocket Kenkyusha. Although this may be lost on most people of my generation, paper dictionaries allow the following:
- Better memorization, because you have "worked for it" when trying to find the word. Typing something into an electronic dictionary leads to simply forgetting the word and then typing it again. This is a proven effect, and many teachers I know ban electronic dictionaries in all forms of language learning outright.
- More precise (or "sensitive") definitions, because that's what good dictionary editors do--refine, and refine, and refine meaning. I don't want a heap of terms to sort through.
- A limited set of definitions. Why should I get 435 entries for "control"? I need the precise meaning, organized by frequency and part of speech.
Anyway, this is probably a slow lead-on to a flame war, so I'll stop here. TO each his own. I suppose I need to look for my answers elsewhere.