@Steven I'm really not quite sure. Reading, I suppose--that's where most nuances come out of the woodwork. However, consider that the same idiom exists in modern Hebrew: סרת כחול. Perhaps the entire "blue" concept has some deeper sexual underpinning in the Western imagination, but it's different in some places. In Russian, for instance, голубой (baby blue) means "homosexual." I could go on and on.
Yep, I can sure use online databases, and I *do*, but, like I mentioned before, this has been like poking blindly in the dark, up until now. By the way--and I hate to do this to an "old timer"--but I think you meant to write "elusive," not "illusive" there.
Anyway, I agree with many of the things you said, and I only hope that the various makers of 電子辞書 realize these problems as well and bring us some fantastic (and reasonably-priced) reference resources.
@KyleGoetz This is interesting. But even more interesting is the fact that Eijiro appears to be
available as an iPhone/iPad app! The good news is that
i英辞郎 is available for only CAD $8.99 on iTunes. The bad news is that its makers were a little bit greedy, so instead of providing their users with free updates, they get them to pay for each increment (I'm seeing i英辞郎 120, i英辞郎 121, i英辞郎 122 in iTunes).
Pig Tail Software appears to have yet
another incremental version of Eijiro, also offered for CAD $8.99.
Mhumm... At second glance, they may not be as greedy as I thought, because there is another app, called
Handy英辞郎 (currently version 127), available for free. This is beginning to look promising! I wish there also were a J-E dictionary like this.
@chryuop I couldn't agree more, but I don't think I'm at that advanced level--where I can use J-J definitions--yet. It may be valuable to me in the future.