My friend found this dictionary and recommended it to me:

http://tangorin.com/

It's better than anything I've seen- you can:
click on any word/kanji in an example sentence to look up that word/kanji
look up multi radical kanji
look up stroke order
create an account and save words (no email required)
etc

I've only fooled around for 5 minutes but be sure and take a look

Seems like Denshi Jisho - http://www.jisho.org

Though creating word lists is pretty cool.

I like the way the multi-radical search works (on both of those sites). Very convenient and fast. I wish I had a mobile device that I could use like that (no internet required).

You can also export your saved lists directly to Anki

captal Wrote:You can also export your saved lists directly to Anki

See, now that's a cool feature. Thanks for sharing this site!

oh this is similar to a program i use, its called YAD Dictionary
which is based off that other site, which i cant recall the name of now

Edict with Tanaka Corpus. Beware.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Edict with Tanaka Corpus. Beware.

Care to say more? Is it contagious?

Ben_Nielson Wrote:I like the way the multi-radical search works (on both of those sites). Very convenient and fast. I wish I had a mobile device that I could use like that (no internet required).

The "shin-kanji" app for iphone/ipod has a very efficient radical search, which I use often. Wish the dictionary side of the app measured up.

Thread on shin kanji: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=1619

yukkuri_kame Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:Edict with Tanaka Corpus. Beware.

Care to say more? Is it contagious?

No, just pretty bad. The Tanaka corpus is filled with errors and many of the sentences are very unnatural, direct translations from English. Not a good source for mining that is.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Edict with Tanaka Corpus. Beware.

Yeah, what's so bad about this? I've always been told to avoid such sentences, but with no good explanation.

sethg Wrote:Yeah, what's so bad about this? I've always been told to avoid such sentences, but with no good explanation.

Here's a good explanation, from Jim Breen himself.

Quote:Professor Tanaka's students were given the task of collecting 300 sentence pairs each. After several years, 212,000 sentence pairs had been collected

From inspection, it appears that many of the sentence pairs have been derived from textbooks, e.g. books used by Japanese students of English. Some are lines of songs, others are from popular books and Biblical passages.

The original collection contained large numbers of errors, both in the Japanese and English. Many of the errors were in spelling and transcription, although in a significant number of cases the Japanese and English contained grammatical, syntactic, etc. errors, or the translations did not match at all.

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/tanakacorpus.html

How it handles and links to the kanji is very useful though, it has some great features from that side - thanks.

No doubt the software it is very well made, just the data is flawed.

I found a bug on it, too. The 'save word' feature to create a vocab list... From a G1, it saves garbage data. (Wrong encoding... aka mojibake.) That's too bad, too, because it was going to be really, really handy when reading a book to look up the word, learn the meaning, then save it to a list to later import to Anki.

I'll probably go see if I can file a bug report.

Bleh, more EDICT. I wish one day the western Japanese learning community would learn how it is handicapping them compared to say the Chinese Japanese learning community that relies heavily on professional 国語 and C-J bilingual dictionaries.

wccrawford Wrote:I found a bug on it, too. The 'save word' feature to create a vocab list... From a G1, it saves garbage data. (Wrong encoding... aka mojibake.) That's too bad, too, because it was going to be really, really handy when reading a book to look up the word, learn the meaning, then save it to a list to later import to Anki.

That's more likely to be a bug on your phone (plain-text can't tag what encoding you're using, so the reader has to guess).

Well, ya know, it's free and for a beginner, it really is extremely hard to use an all Japanese dictionary. I do agree, though, that EDICT isn't the greatest thing to use at all. I think that once you're finished with kanji, you should start learning the terminology used in dictionaries. Then your knowledge will just build exponentially from looking up new words.

sethg Wrote:Well, ya know, it's free and for a beginner, it really is extremely hard to use an all Japanese dictionary. I do agree, though, that EDICT isn't the greatest thing to use at all. I think that once you're finished with kanji, you should start learning the terminology used in dictionaries. Then your knowledge will just build exponentially from looking up new words.

If someone is too low of a level to use a 国語 dictionary, then they should get a decent bilingual dictionary. 研究社和英中辞典 is a good choice. The 大辞典 is of course better, but it's hard to justify the cost unless you do translation. There are several ways to access professional dictionaries online for free (legally) too, such as using Yahoo Japan's dictionary (http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/).

Being free is no reason to use something if it's not particularly good. EDICT has uses (rare terminology & slang), but a dictionary for learning from is not one of them.