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Back to Users' Opinions on Japanese Language Tools Dictionary System
A beginner's experiences
Submitted by Peter Payzant on 28/Oct/2007
Message:
I've been the happy owner of one of Peter's JLT systems for a couple of weeks now, and I thought that I would relate my experiences and opinions.
I ordered the complete system, plus the optional CEdict Mandarin Chinese-English dictionary. During the ordering process Peter was communicative and helpful, and when the Axim arrived, it was well packaged, very clean and included all the bits and pieces as advertised. Later experience uncovered a very minor hardware problem, and Peter has offered to replace the Axim as soon as he has new stock.
The Axim is a lovely little machine. It's very comfortable to hold in the hand, and the screen is bright and very sharp, as Peter says over and over again on his web site. At the time I ordered it Peter had some used Magnum cases in stock and I got one of those as well; it's very impressive. Strong, a great dull black finish and very thin and light. I suggest that any Axim owner spring for one of these.
Now, the dictionary itself. I purchased an English-language Axim, with the understanding that there would be some rough edges not present on the Japanese version. My Japanese is not yet to the point where I'm comfortable dealing with Japanese menus. The main oddity I've encountered is that the little floating palette controlling the IME is sometimes present more than once, and when this happens, it's not obvious which one is controlling the IME. However, I can easily live with this: experimentation reveals which one is the active one, or I can do a soft reset to clean things up. There may be some other small problems but they are so minor that I've forgotten about them.
As a basic learner of Japanese, I have to keep reminding myself that this is not a translator, it is a dictionary (or rather five dictionaries). Because Japanese is seldom printed with spaces between the words, translating a large block of text can be tedious - the next word might be one, two or more characters, all of which can be found in the JLT. This of course would be just the same with a paper dictionary, just a lot slower, and not nearly as much fun.
Like all dictionaries, these have a great deal of meta-information with each entry, such as what part of speech the word is. Verbs, for example, in the Edict have stuff like (v5k, vi) included. These can be looked up in Edict itself using the Super Jump feature. Eijiro is a different matter: there's tons of typographical content and references, and so far I'm not sure where to get more information about this. In Kanjidict, one must be cautious with the Nelson numbers. It seems that there are at least two systems of numbers out there, and Kanjidict doesn't give the correct numbers for a recent paperback version of Nelson. The stroke diagrams in Kanjidict are very welcome.
These minor cavills aside, the system is very fast, convenient and a lot of fun to use. We (my wife and I) take it everywhere and spend a lot of time working out what various signs mean, just for the pleasure of increasing our understanding of what's going on around us in Tokyo.
Other uses: I installed a Chinese dictionary and flash-card system called PlecoDict. It runs perfectly on the slightly altered English operating system, with the minor problem of the duplicated palette at times. We're also using the Axim for more ordinary things, like taking notes and playing videos.
Overall I would have to say that I am delighted with this product. It works exactly as advertised, and Peter's pre-and post-sales support are excellent. It's a little more expensive than the dictionaries that the Japanese use, but much better suited to English speakers and a pleasure to own.
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