My humble 2016 JLPT N3 thread

(2016-04-24, 7:52 am)anotherjohn Wrote: Having had a 'look inside' I got the impression that the bulk of every RRJ book consists of a half-assed J->E dictionary, which seems like a shame.

Well, I think the glosses are kind of the point. They mean you don't have to break your flow all the time to look things up in the dictionary, they give you the relevant meaning or connotation of the word rather than the other three possible senses of the word, and they give glosses of phrases or longer stretches of text where that's useful. If you just want raw Japanese text, you can get that elsewhere, but the idea I think is to provide a format where you can mostly read the Japanese and quickly drop down to look at the glosses where you would otherwise have had problems.