A fair evaluation indeed, Steven, and perhaps an indication for the big publishing houses to get off their butts and write a comprehensive dictionary. Hey, my first language is Russian and we've got some pretty comprehensive English-Russian Russian-English dictionaries (and in many ways the two languages are as different as night and day). How come the best thing that Oxford could come up with for Russian is a 500,000-word, 1,344-page behemoth (last
published in 2007), but the best thing they have for Japanese is a measly 45,000-word
Kenkyusha with English headwords? ...and then there's that Japanese-published
$500 J-E Kenkyusha, again. Argh.
Look, I don't know. I'd say that I've surpassed most native speakers of English in terms of usage and variety of vocabulary, and English is my fourth language (after Russian, Hebrew, and French--though my French isn't as good anymore). Very often, the only way for me to figure things out was to burrow into my large Webster and research definitions and *their* definitions. I cannot do this with Japanese. Meanings fragment and multiply, and even if I do get a great example sentence database, I have to learn the context or the vocab of the whole sentence to get to the nuance of a single word. I cannot express in words how frustrating this has been.
Anyway, I think I'm going to bite the bullet and order the two J-E and E-J Lighthouse dictionaries I'd linked up earlier. That should set me back at most CDN $140 (shipping from Japan included)...so it's not USD $450, at the very least.
If anyone cares about this situation, I will keep your guys posted. (BTW, yes, I agree, the Oxford Beginner's Japanese Dictionary *is* very well written...it's just that I have exceeded many of the things it has to offer, in terms of thoughts, opinions, and emotions). To be continued?