You're on your way to having the best Japanese language tool money can buy. You've probably looked into denshi jisho (electronic dictionaries like the Canon Wordtank series)—if you're in Japan, you've certainly seen your Japanese friends and colleagues punching furiously away at theirs. Denshi jisho are the perfect language tools for the users they were designed for: native Japanese who need help with English. They can be quite useful for those of us in the opposite circumstance, as well, but there's something much better out there.
This is a solution designed around the needs of non-native Japanese speakers who want help with Japanese. Basically, you get a personal digital assistant (PDA) or smartphone and load it up with a good dictionary reader program and various dictionaries. And you can do it easily.
There are two ways to go.
Denshi jisho are designed for someone who knows Japanese like a native. There are two big problems for the rest of us:
- Denshi jisho don't have a great way to enter kanji you don't know. This isn't a huge problem for a native Japanese who's already spent 12 or 16 years learning kanji.. But even for the native speaker, the lookup options on the PDA system are much better (not to mention more fun). In addition to the same input and lookup methods you'd find in a denshi jisho, in a Windows Mobile PDA you can simply draw the kanji on the screen to find it--it works beautifully and it's forgiving of mistakes.
- The second problem is harder to overcome. To look up a Japanese word in the main dictionaries of a regular denshi jisho, you have to enter it in hiragana (or katakana if the word is normally written that way). Thus if you see a word in kanji and don't know how to write it in hiragana (how to pronounce it), you can't look it up in those dictionaries. There's an awkward workaround, but even that works for only about 20% of the Japanese words in the denshi jisho--so 80% of the time you simply cannot find the word. For example, if you see the word "活躍" and don't know how to write it in hiragana, you can't look it up in a denshi jisho. However, the word IS in there--if you already know the word, as the intended user certainly would, you'd simply enter "かつやく" and instantly find "活躍 【かつやく】 (n) (1) activity (esp. energetic)." If you ever need or want to read Japanese, a regular denshi jisho is not going to be much help. With a PDA dictionary, you can look up a Japanese word by how it's pronounced, just like in a regular denshi jisho, but you can also look any word up by the kanji in it. When you're reading, whether it's a sign by the side of the road, a menu in a pub, or a text essential to your thesis, the PDA dictionary is a lifesaver. Click to see some examples in Edict, Waeijiro, Koujien, and Kenkyusha. How many Japanese words can you find if you search by kanji in a denshi jisho? About 48,000 of the 250,000 or so Japanese words in the various dictionaries (and they're not the 48,000 most common or useful words, either--they were selected to illustrate kanji). How many in my PDA dictionary? All 2 million. What's 2 million divided by 48,000? If you've got a PDA dictionary, you can find that out, quickly, too, because the PDA also includes a calculator.
Of course, it's not just what the denshi jisho do wrong, it's what the PDA/Smartphone dictionary does right.
- Using the free Edict and the spectacular Eijiro dictionaries, you'll have about 1.8 million English-to-Japanese entries and another 1.9 million Japanese-to-English. That's 10-20 times more than the dictionaries built into denshi jisho have (about 50 times more if you're trying to look up Japanese words by kanji). It's a pretty common experience for me and a friend with a denshi jisho to be looking up a word or expression at the same time: especially with figures of speech, complicated or rare terms, and colloquial terms, often I can find it but she can't. That's saved many a conversation. Eijiro also has great example sentences to illustrate how a word is used (not just nuance, but grammar--from the examples you can see what particle to use and how to structure a sentence)--and with the cross search feature, it's easy to find not just words but phrases and sentences. Another bonus: my version of Edict includes a guide to conjugating every verb in the dictionary.
- The PDA or Smartphone is essentially a computer. You can add whatever dictionaries you want and need. In fact, you can add exactly the same dictionaries you'd find on any given model of denshi jisho—and because of problem 2, above, the PDA versions will be much more powerful. Plus, I'm always working hard to improve how my dictionary system works--as great as it is now, every few months you can download a new version of something and make it even better.
- Again, the PDA or Smartphone is a small computer, not just a dictionary, so you can add whatever other software to it you like. I run a huge astronomy database and sky map, a GPS navigation program with hi-res topo maps of all of Japan, an mp3 player, photos and slideshows I use in the classroom, a full scientific calculator, my appointment and phone books, and a few games. If I wanted, I could watch movies, surf the web, check my email, edit Word or Excel documents, use Skype, or find any postal code in Great Britain--it's a computer (in my case with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth), so the possibilities are endless.
- If you get a PDA or SmartPhone with a VGA display, as I recommend, the size and clarity of the display beat any denshi jisho hands down--even though the entire PDA, safely in its armored metal case, is smaller and more pocketable than most denshi jisho. Check out this screenshot (note that a VGA PDA has much higher resolution--pixels per inch--than your monitor, so even though it has the same number of pixels the actual display is both smaller and sharper than it looks here).
Finally, I do have to acknowledge that there are die-hard denshi-jisho fans out there. If you're at a high enough level of Japanese that you can get full use out of a device designed for a native speaker, you may find that a regular denshi jisho will serve you well for much less money; you might even find a high-end denshi jisho, about the same price as what I offer but including a shelf full of specialized dictionaries, will suit your needs better. You might just like the way a regular denshi jisho works better. If you'd like to find out more about the standard denshi jisho, take a look at bornplaydie.com's helpful guide.
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