Hi there,

Thanks to this site, I got word of this Nintendo DS game that sports a kanji dictionary! I was just about to throw away 500 bucks on another one too, until I found out... thank goodness. I have a Nintendo DS kicking around that I thought I'd never use again.

Anyways, I was wondering if anyone could tell me if there is anything bad about this dictionary. I tried looking around on the Internet to find the kanji count, as some expensive Casio dictionaries have about 12,000 Kanji definitions... I was also wondering if anyone knows the count for this "game"?

Thanks... any comments about it in any regard welcome!

I have the game. Maybe I just haven't looked hard enough, but I can't get info on individual kanji, just words. I hope someone else knows.

It's got the Genius 2nd edition dictionary in it. Genius and Kenkyusha are probably the two best E-J J-E dictionaries out there. So how many kanji? All of the ones you'll probably ever need, except for that 0.01% of oddball stuff.

As for vocab/words, well, you may not always find an entry for what you're looking for, but if you buy a denshi jisho, you're getting the same basic E-J J-E dictionary. The difference is that denshi jishos often have other extra dictionaries you can consult for old, obscure, or otherwise oddball words.

If you can't find it on that, then just use the mycroft plugins for Firefox for ALC, Yahoo.co.jp, excite.co.jp's kenkyusha dictoinary, and dictionary.goo.ne.jp. And if you can't find it there, then you're just out of luck.

I also have this gamesoft and it is awesome. Highly recommended. The character recognition, while seemingly uncaring about stroke order, is also pretty great.

urpwnd Wrote:The character recognition, while seemingly uncaring about stroke order, is also pretty great.

Very true. I'm constantly amazed at how good it is at recognizing the characters. Sometimes I make them almost unrecognizable on purpose, and it still understands!

Kanji Sonomama doesn't contain a kanji dictionary, so there's no way to get a count on how many kanji characters it contains.

For reference, it contains the following dictionaries.

Meikyo J-J: 70,000 entries
Genius E-J: 95,000 entries
Genius J-E: 82,000 entries

More information here:
http://www.nintendo.co.jp/ds/arjj/dictionary/index.html

Anyway (sorry for the multiple posts) its entries contain a lot of kanji. I've always found all the kanji I needed, and that includes also quite a few non-RTK1/3 ones.

Does anyone know if there's a way to save the words you look up so you can enter some sentences about them into an SRS at a later date? Does it have a history or something?

Does the J-J dictionary have example sentences?

phauna: you can browse troutgh the words you searched using the R and L buttons or the arrows in the upper left of the screen, I think it also let's you keep 3 separate histories, but they get erased every time you restart the game

uberstuber Wrote:Does the J-J dictionary have example sentences?

I think I recall having seen an example sentence in the J-J part on occasion. But honestly, they are so few and far between that I would just go ahead and say "no, there aren't any".
The J-E DOES contain quite a few example sentences in both Japanese and English.

Almost every entry in the j-j has example sentences (often 2-4), but they're very short.

What, really? I thought those were the definitions :p Maybe I need to practice using it more.

Those example sentences (the ones in brackets) are more like demonstrations of common usages of the word. Sometimes they help you understand the meaning better if you're having problems with the definition. They can also be used for your SRS, anyway.

Looks interesting,
I see that Tae Kim also recommends it..
http://www.guidetojapanese.org/blog/2008.../#comments

Holy hell his stroke order makes my brain hemorrhage. Apparently makes the dictionaries systems hemorrhage as well.
Looks nice, though.