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01-21-2011, 03:59 AM
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It is hands down better than any dictionary I've ever seen in any two languages. Now, obviously a purely Japanese dictionary will be best (just like the OED is the gold standard for 100% English inquiries), but Eijiro is as good as it gets for English to any other langauge and back. The equivalent of the OED for Japanese is the Kojien, which has 240K words in it. Now, the Kojien will run you about 8400 yen (Amazon.co.jp: , but then again the OED will run you US$1300 (Amazon.com: Oxford English Dictionary: 20 vol. print set & CD ROM (9780199573158): J. Simpson, E. Weiner: Books. 
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01-21-2011, 04:16 AM
It merits another look, then. Sorry, all of this has bee written between seminars.
Now, I understand your views on paper dictionaries. Having said that, I have discovered that 新和英大辞典 is available for the iPhone on iTunes for only CAD $109.99; the 新英和大辞典 counterpart is also $109.99), while Amazon Japan carries a J-E Kenkyusha for ￥22,050 and an E-J Kenkyusha for ￥22,050. Now, this is very interesting, if we follow your logic that digital=better. Whereas I'd have to pay ￥44,100.00 (CAD $529.379) to have a set of the most comprehensive paper E-J and J-E dictionaries on earth, I can pay a mere CAD $219.98 for a set of both, right on my iPhone (or iPod Touch, or iPad!) This is it! This is the answer I have been looking for!
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01-21-2011, 04:18 AM
That is very interesting. I'm always feel very humbled when I talk to people who know multiple languages. I've only got English and a bit of Japanese so that's as far as my personal experience goes. From what I've heard though, languages like French and Englsh are quite similiar. Basically European languages all have similar roots (especially when compared to languages like Eng vs Jp). I think the fact that the cultures are somewhat similar lends a lot to this idea.
I can see that you are looking for very specific nuances in words and phrasing. If I understand correctly, you're looking for an almost firm definition of a word enabling you to utilize it in as many contexts as possible. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's thought of things this way, but I'll say it anyways (as best I can). If this is obvious to you I apologize (which it may very well be as you have studied so many languages). At some point in my studies, I realized that I was looking at words from English and Japanese as though they were on some kind of venn diagram. That was a huge epiphany to me as this was a concept I think I really would have benefited from earlier on. To give you an idea of what I mean, think of the words "はい" and "Yes". Now if you made a venn diagram of those two words you would certainly see a lot of overlapping area. However, you would also find areas that don't overlap... as well as some areas were one word might even overlap with the opposite of the other! For example, はい can be used as ”あいづち” in areas were "yes" wouldn't be appropriate. Getting into the realm of culture, you could say "はい" (as あいづち) when it might be appropriate to say "No" in English. For another example, think of a color. "Blue" vs ”青い”. I can think of many situations where 青い would overlap with my (American) English concept of "green" (like certain types of grass or tea or street lights... also the idea of "being green (like a rookie)" is "青" in Japanese. These are two seemingly elementary words-- something you might learn within the first couple of chapters of any Japanese textbook. I find it interesting to note that you could write a chapter or maybe even a whole book on either one of those examples. That kind of deep contextual meaning doesn't really have a place in a dictionary... furthermore, I can't even imagine trying to document this phenomenon for all kinds of words! I'm sure the writers and editers of dictionaries are aware of this concept, but I highly doubt that anyone could have such a thorough understanding of this concept as to be able to express it in the shorthandedness of a dictionary entry. I have to ask you Mike, do you see the 'venn diagram' thing I was talking about as applicable to Russian-English or Russian-French, or any of the possible combinations of the languages you've learned? If you do see it, do the dictionaries you've had experience with compensate appropriately for it in your opinion? In my experience this is one area where ENG-JP, JP-ENG dictonaries are really lacking. The examples in-context that electronic dictionaries sometimes supply can make up for this a little bit though. I mean, I agree with you-- a $500 dictionary is steep. You might as well invest that money into a plane ticket to Japan. I'd imagine you'd get your money's worth that way  .By the way you have me interested in the Oxford Beginner's Japanese Dictionary-- I'm gonna be looking at some reviews of it. I'm curious as to what it has to offer that other dictionaries lack in. I'm also curious if the dictionaries you end up getting are a continuation of what you found useful in the Beginner's books. EDIT* "Now, this is very interesting, if we follow your logic that digital=better. Whereas I'd have to pay ￥44,100.00 (CAD $529.379) to have a set of the most comprehensive paper E-J and J-E dictionaries on earth, I can pay a mere CAD $219.98 for a set of both, right on my iPhone (or iPod Touch, or iPad!) This is it! This is the answer I have been looking for!" That sounds pretty cool. One of the things that interests me about the "digitalization" of books like this is the possible ability to do a "ctrl-f"-like search to jump around and find what I'm looking for in seconds rather than hours! God I wish I had that ability in college while writing essays-- I could've been even lazier about it all.
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01-21-2011, 06:38 AM
Steven, I wish this knowledge stayed as effortlessly as it came to me. I think by now I have lost a lot of my Hebrew conversation ability, but back in 1996 I could talk fluently. Practice makes perfect.
Indeed, French and English are cognates, and it should be noted that Japanese is a SOV language, English is an SVO language, and Russian (though SVO) allows a whole lot of word order recombinations. It's interesting that when I ponder some Russian words, it eventually hits me that it is actually a French word. Damn the 17th century aristocracy. Yes, you are correct in your assumption. Just yesterday I was looking for the common word for "body shop" or "auto repair shop." jisho.org finally yielded 修繕工場 (damn the British-American differences, by the way). Sure enough, my Japanese friend has just told me that this is the wrong word to use. How would I know otherwise? Keep performing random Google searches? I think you are also absolutely correct with regard to precise meaning. I actually never learned the grammar of the English language--that is, before I became an ESL/EFL teacher in Japan and later in Vancouver. The different senses and conditions you mention came to me naturally. Likewise, the あいづち you're talking about (by the way, laughably translated as "sounds given during a conversation to indicate comprehension; back-channeling") had bewildered me quite a bit too, at first. Now it just seems natural to intone a long ええ～！ in surprise, or a short え in agreement, etc. Context and body language...but, then again, that's just like the difference between word stress: WHOM did you meet at the store? Whom DID you meet at the store? Whom did YOU meet at the store? Whom did you MEET at the store? Whom did you meet at THE store? Whom did you meet at the STORE? You get the idea. Oh, yeah, and idioms for colours. This has always been a favourite with my students. In Japan, pink is the colour of エロ, but in the West pink is the colour of innocence and *blue* is the colour of sexuality (blue movie)...but then again, you could be feeling blue, or be green with envy, or seeing red. Good times.Well, to answer your question, do keep in mind that I am an emigre. Having arrived in Canada when I was about fourteen, I became detached from a fully-immersive Russian-speaking environment, so my Russian is probably 85-90% "authentic" by the standards of a "native Russian." Having said that, I certainly see the problem with false cognates, false friends, and just plain dumb assumptions that, I think, describe something akin to your venn-diagram problem. For instance, revisiting some of my earliest poetry in English I found both awkward or totally inappropriate word usage or word usage that *could* fit the sentence--in general--but never in the specific context it was used. In this regard, I suppose I had to abandon English-Russian-English translation and go full force into English-English definitions (definitions of definitions), which is the natural step for all advanced learners. ...but let's make an objective study of this. I'm going to pick a word at random. Let's say..."anger." The Oxford Beginner's Japanese Dictionary very helpfully states: anger noun = いかり・怒り angry adjective to get angry = おこる・怒る to be angry with someone = だれかにおこっている・誰かに怒っている There you go. No complicated conjugations, no part-of-speech confusion (because the sense in which I'm writing may pertain to the action, which would have to be formed from the adjective, unlike from the verb in English). You can just start building sentences! Now, let's enter "anger" into jisho.org. The first word is はらだち, then どき...いかり comes up 19th! How would I have known to look there? They're *all* "anger"! Ah, but you say, click "Common words only"...well, it still comes third, and it is still the wrong word. On WWWJDIC, the word doesn't even come up on the first page. Although I have almost outgrown it, I love the Oxford still, because it also has 35 pages of usage notes, 34 pages of the "Learning and Lifestyle Kit" and a grammar bit at the beginning. The editors at Oxford obviously knew what they were doing. Finally, in answer to your question regarding the marvel of technology I have found on iTunes...allow me to tantalize you a bit:   Oh, I do wish it were $50 cheaper!
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01-21-2011, 07:01 AM
By the way, Kyle is right. I like the definitions that http://www.alc.co.jp/ gives out. It might be just the solution for those not wishing to shell out $200 for the iPhone apps.
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01-21-2011, 08:31 AM
Wow Mike, you have posted some interesting stuff. By the way, how in the hell did you know about "blue" being one of those colors in western/American culture? The "blue movie" thing you talked about made me think of the song called Peg, by Steely Dan-- there is a line that goes, "done up in blue print blue". I had to look up what that meant and that's how I found out what you're talking about. Maybe it's just me, but I was under the impression that a lot of people didn't know about that!
That Iphone thing looks like it might be neat-- I don't know much about iphones, but couldn't you use online dictionaries with it for the time being (like alc.co.jp)? (although you pointed out a pretty big weakness of online dictionaries!). I think things like iphones are fantastic-- all that data on such a small device is awesome. I always wished they'd come out with something like an ipad where i could store all my textbooks when I was in high school. Too bad it was like a decade late. The word stress thing is huge too. From what I can tell that seems to be the most illusive part of English for ESL students. I've only met a handful of people who actually know how it works. I think there could possibly be a day when iphone-like dictionaries have audio clips and examples of these concepts (if they don't already!). Something else about technology-- I just thought of this now, but what with youtube being able to... somewhat figure out what people are saying and transcribe it, there might be some really sweet data to come from it. Once that becomes more reliable and powerful it could prove to be a huge tool for linguistics. That might be 10-20 years down the road though. I feel like I'm getting off topic, but I think if the technology that is available is taken advantage of we'll see some really cool new 'dictionaries' in the near future.
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01-21-2011, 02:49 PM
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It will run on Windows 7 and OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Also, it apparently has 1.5 million words in it.
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01-21-2011, 03:40 PM
Weird how every dictionary gives different result
 Like many I have started using 漢字そのまま楽引辞典. Might not be the best like the one you are looking for, but it was made by Japanese people for Japanese people...thus I trust it more than many other dictionary. Moreover I quit using it as Japanese-English dictionary, but I use it as a Japanese monolingual dictionary.It won't give long explanations, but I that satisfies my needs. I just give you an example for the research "body shop". 車体工場；（（米俗））売春宿；（デモ要員などの）人 員供給会社。 I think it teaches more seeing the way Japanese people write for themselves than seeing how we write about them...just my opinion. 暗闇の中 歩くしかねぇ everything’s gonna be okay 恐れることねぇ 辛い時こそ胸を張れ
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01-21-2011, 04:59 PM
@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.
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01-21-2011, 05:04 PM
Argh! There are no free breakfasts! I've just installed Handy英辞郎 and it's asking me to buy the database for $8.99. It's not *that* bad, I suppose (and it's definitely not $450 or $200!) but I wish they would advertise this up-front (unless I am totally blind today). Anyway, the good news is that Handy英辞郎 appears to be both E-J and J-E. I need to investigate this further...
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