) |
) |
) |
|
Eijiro is the "big dog" of Japanese-English dictionaries. It's actually a suite of dictionaries--the two main ones are Eijiro (yes, the same name as the whole package), which has over 2 million English-to-Japanese entries, and Waeijiro, which has over 2 million Japanese-to-English entries. The suite also includes separate dictionaries of example sentences, abbreviations, and acronyms (these are folded into Eijiro and Waeijiro in the JLT version). Eijiro was made and continues to be updated by the Electronic Dictionary Project (EDP), a society for professional translators; as such, it's especially rich in difficult and obscure terms, colloquial expressions, and technical terms. When a conversation reaches an impasse over a critical word or expression, the electronic dictionaries come out--it's common for me to quickly find it in Eijiro or Waeijiro, while my Japanese friends pounding away on their high-end Wordtanks and Ex-Words come up dry ("come up dry" is in Eijiro!). Not only does Eijiro have a huge number of words and phrases, it also gives you a good bit of information about them, especially example sentences showing the meaning more precisely and how to use the word or expression grammatically.
Eijiro is a tremendous resource, but it was designed for Japanese users (for example, only a small number of Japanese words in the English-to-Japanese entries and NONE in the Japanese-to-English entries have yomigana showing you how to pronounce the word). For those of us who are NOT native Japanese speakers, the JLT version of Eijiro is a huge improvement over the original. The biggest advantage: yomigana for almost every word. This, in turn, means two things.
The
current JLT system consists of two dictionaries, Eijiro for
English-to-Japanese lookups and Waeijiro for
Japanese-to-English. Here are a
few screenshots--English-to-Japanese on the top (note the dictionary
name "Eijiro" in the bar at the top of the screen) and
Japanese-to-English on the bottom ("Waeijiro"). For an explanation
of how the dictionary program itself works, please see the EBPocket
page. Note the yomigana next to kanji-containing words and the
example sentences. These are
old screenshots! In the current version, you have the choice
of seeing yomigana in subscript after the word (makes it easy to
distinguish yomigana from the run of text) or in heavy brackets
after the text (easier to read for older eyes, and a bit easier to
distinguish from the run of text than the light brackets shown
below). New screenshots will be posted soon!
|
|
|
|
And
here's what you get when you look up a Japanese word (click any to see
it in full VGA): Again, old
screenshots. In the new version, yomigana for the keyword (the
heading for each entry, the word you'd look up) are in heavy
brackets on a line below the keyword, and grammar and usage notes
have mostly been translated into English (e.g., instead of "{形}"
you'll see "{adj}" in the new version).
) |
) |
) |
|
You'll find the word whether you've written kana or kanji into the find box.
Note that I've sized the images here to appear about the same physical size as on a typical smart phone screen (depending on your monitor, of course); however a smart phone would cram a lot more pixels into the little space, so the text will be much sharper on it. You can click on each screen above to see a larger version to get an idea of the detail you'd see in real life. And of course you can change the text size to be larger or smaller, too, which will also affect legibility.
Basically, enter a word in the search window and tap Find (you can see that in the first part of the animation on the right, below). Pretty easy, huh? The key thing to remember is that English words are Eijiro and Japanese are in Waeijiro--if you enter, say 惑星 or わくせい into Eijiro you won't find anything; ditto if you enter an English word into Waeijiro. See the general instructions for particulars on how to enter text and see the EBPocket page for particulars on using the software. Both Eijiro and Waeijiro are huge, so I don't recommend that you use the Full search type in them (Full searches the entire text, not just the index of keywords--and when the text is hundreds of thousands pages long, that can take quite a few minutes; all the other search types take between 0.1 and 2 seconds.
The JLT version adds one more feature that makes Eijiro dramatically more useful. In the Search Type pull-down menu to the right of the Find button at the top, you can choose Cross as a search type. You can enter one or more words, separated by spaces, in English or Japanese, and Cross Search will find all entries with those words anywhere in the keyword. Trust me, however useful you think this sounds, it's even more useful. It's great when you're looking for a phrase and aren't sure exactly how to word it. It's great when you're trying to find an example sentence to show the grammar of how to use something. For example, recently I wanted to see what particle and word order to use in saying "compare A with B," so I did a cross search of "compare with" and found both a general entry explaining the grammar and several more particular, real-life example sentences. You can enter "cat dog" to find out how to say "it's raining cats and dogs." You probably won't use it much at first as you get used to the dictionaries in general, then you'll try it out once in a while, and soon--especially as you advance in ability and your needs become more complex--you'll find yourself using cross search more and more often, in ways even I haven't thought of yet. Especially with official correspondence, I can often compose an entire letter with sentences I've found this way (lazy, but useful!). Note that, for Japanese searches, you can't enter hiragana or katakana in a Cross search.
A side effect of adding the yomigana to the dictionary as a whole is that, if a word can be pronounced more than one way, all the different pronunciations will be added wherever that word appears. This doesn't really affect the entries for inividual words too much, but in some entries for example sentences, both readings will be shown, even though only only of them really makes sense in context. Fortunately you won't run into this too often, and when you do you can simply jump to Edict to see which pronunciation is right in that context.
Eijiro is made for translators, so it assumes you already know basic vocabulary. Sometimes if you search for a fairly basic word, you won't find it--in that case, look in Edict. Sometimes, too, you'll look up a basic English word like "dog" and, because it assumes any Japanese who's gotten through elementary school knows that "dog" is "犬【いぬ】," it gives you more colloquial meanings instead of just the straight one. You can always spot this, because the definition will look too complicated for the simple term, and it'll be followed by a number of subsidiary phrases in which "dog" is translated as "犬｛いぬ｝." Hard to explain and it doesn't come up that often (and never for anything but the simplest vocabulary), but when it does it's easy to spot. Having both dictionaries gives you just about every Japanese word you're ever likely to encounter.
JLT conversion of Eijiro dictionaries and sale on this website by written permission of EDP (obtained August 11, 2008). "Eijiro" is a registered trademark of Sachiko Michihata. The current JLT version of Eijiro is based on v. 142 of the Eijiro data, current as of August, 2014.
While the dictionary data in Eijiro comes from EDP, the JLT version has been heavily altered. JLT takes responsibility for any errors in the data. Further, the version of Eijiro described here is available ONLY from this site. The original, unaltered version of Eijiro is sold as a download from the website of EDP, the group that made and continues to maintain it. But if you want Eijiro with full yomigana, Japanese Language Tools is the only place you'll find it.
Because of all the work that's gone into Eijiro (and I'm referring to the that of the original makers, too, not just my own) and because any piracy by my customers could endanger my ability to offer Eijiro, I put a unique identifying code into every copy I sell and I regularly check all the downloading sites. Even converting the dictionary to another electronic format won't remove the code. If one of my customers posts a copy of Eijiro to any file sharing site, I will be able to prove who bought that copy and I will turn that information over to Eijiro's lawyers. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but it's necessary. The JLT version of Eijiro includes no spyware or malware, no tracking software, and no DRM tricks that impede your use of the dictionary. The
JLT version of Eijiro is available for download for 1980 yen or on
DVD-ROM for a small additional fee; please visit the
JLT Dictionaries page to buy it. The
download is approximately 1.5 GB and so requires a broadband
connection.
The JLT version of Eijiro, and all JLT dictionaries, can be used on just about any device you own, including Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, Android phones and tablets, iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches, and any other platform that offers Japanese text capability and an EPWING-compatible dictionary app or program (click the links above for information on using the JLT dictionaries on each system).
The JLT version of Eijiro is included in all JLT Complete Systems--these use the very best hardware for a Japanese dictionary. After the JLT Complete System, the next-best platform for a Japanese dictionary is the Samsung Galaxy Note (any version). Other Androids and iPhones, iPads, and the iPod Touch can also make great dictionaries.
){kind=link}
){kind=link}