Quote:
Originally Posted by neothe1
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. |
I'm sorry we couldn't help you. About the whole memorization because you worked for it concept goes, I can see that. I think we have similar experiences. I have had hundreds of experiences of watching kids use both paper and electronic dictionaries. I have a ton of experience myself. I think a big problem with dictionaries is they don't provide a lot of context. That article that I posted pointed out that writing a dictionary for JP-ENG/ENG-JP is quite a daunting task when considering both audiences... writing for both audiences is practically impossible (native ENG & native JP). I agree that while wwwjdic is a wonderful website and resource, it does leave a lot of blanks to be filled at the end of the day. Expecting what you seem to be from one source might be unreasonable. If the dictionaries you found actually DO accomplish that I'd like to get them myself! Unfortunately, experience in this area has taught me that even expensive dictionaries can't teach a lot of the nuances that we as non-natives are looking for.
For me, a combination of the DS electronic dictonary, WWWJDIC, Seichi Makino & Michio Tsutsui's Japanese Grammar book series, some linguistic books, some Japanese grammar books written for Japanese people, a handful of "communicative styles of Japanese"-type books, and a whole lot of real life interaction have gotten me past that "intermediate" hump.
I think that is the nature of language to be honest. It's a multi-dimensional thing, especially when considering two languages as culturally different as English and Japanese. From my perspective as a native English speaker, I see the spoken/written forms of Japanese as being only half the battle.
I think the DS dictionary is not as overwhelming as a lot of the more expensive and more advanced electronic dictionaries go. The option to narrow search results that MissMisa talked about sounds like something would be interested in, Mike. That's something that I'd never heard about before actually... I always did feel a little overwhelmed whenever I borrwed a friend's or colleague's electronic dictionary.
To be honest though, judging by what MissMisa and you have said about paper dictionaries I'm beginning to think I've just encountered a lot of shitty dictionaries. I've had a few pocket dictonaries, a few novel sized paper back dictionaries, a fairly large sized paper back dictionary, and some small phrase books. I didn't buy all of them, some of them were given to me or kind of just ended up in my possession. I think I have a dictionary for every decade since the 70's (my earliest one being '73). I've also seen a lot of dictionaries used by Japanese schools and those might be some of the worst ones I've encountered (which is rather unfortunate). The more I advance, the less I trust dictionaries. I would never trust one as a companion to produce Japanese with... I think they're fine for interpretation though. I've used a couple of Random House dictionaries and felt like they were kind of lacking-- is that a characteristic of them? I feel like maybe I just don't know a good dictionary when I see one.