Since my wife was reclaiming the electronic dictionary she borrowed me after I came to Japan (actually she would have liked a new one), I thought this was a perfect occasion to purchase one that added Korean to the mix. Given the Korean drama boom a few years ago, I thought that there would be plenty of models to choose from. Wrong. There's a good choice of Chinese-Japanese-English models, but for Korean beyond basic travel sentences, the store clerk (K's Denki if you want to know) had to consult every brochure of every maker before finding one and only one that fit the description: a Casio EX-word XD-SF7600, part of a series of trilingual dictionaries offering also Russian, Spanish, etc.
Luckily the next store a few kilometers away had one in store, so the next day we went there for the purchase. Now, Japanese are not known for haggling (they love their point cards, coupons and omake gifts though, which require minimal communication), except, apparently, when it comes to hardware. K's Denki offers no point cards, only lowest prices, so if you can show that another chain offers a better price, you can usually get that price, instead of getting more points as in other stores. But in this case we didn't really know about other stores, and still my wife talked and talked until she got 10% off the price and a case on top. I just stood by and admired the charade.
This beauty has Korean keyboard input, automatically switched to when selecting the Korean-Japanese dictionary, native sound for many words (also for the other languages), digital sound for the rest (Korean only), but not for example sentences, except the aforementioned travel sentences (which also include 7 or so other languages and have both English and Japanese translations), a writing pad with stylus to jot down notes and enter characters (any language) for direct input using OCR, and more. The Korean words have phonetical transcriptions in both (phonetic) roman letters and katakana, and sometimes hanja.
There are three Korean dictionaries from two publishers, one offering both KJ and JK, the other only KJ. So no Korean-Korean I'm afraid. If you want to go Korean-English or vice versa, you always have Japanese as an intermediate step, so it's a huge plus if you're already proficient in Japanese. It may at the same time help you expand your Japanese vocabulary. Surprisingly the Japanese-English dictionary is not linked to any of the top buttons, but only accessible through the menu, unlike the English-Japanese dictionary. For some time I was under the impression that JE would be restricted to the index for the English-Japanese dictionary, which is far from an ideal way of looking for definitions, before I found the JE dict in the menu and moved it to the list of preferred dictionaries. If I only had the index, I would have gone JJ full bore, now at least I have a choice.
One of the first things I tried out, was the flashcard feature. Quite the bummer. Six decks of at most 100 cards, front and back, but the worst is you create cards by scribbling on the writing pad. I don't see the advantage of learning from scribbles on a digital machine with a perfectly capable keyboard. I didn't bother to look at what the flashcard algorithm was like. Probably just shows up every card in random order each time you start a drill.
A far better feature is the word list feature. This allows you to select words from the dictionary and add them to a list (one per dictionary), then when you display the list, you see the words only, in Hangeul and Hanja, 17 at a time; clicking one will bring you to its definition. I'm using that now to familiarize myself with the Hangeul characters and sounds, based on the words for the writing practices in the course I'm now following. Not really ideal for rehearsing stuff (Anki would be better), but good enough for a first dip into the vocabulary, with immediate access to definitions and sounds.
So far I love my new toy. Now back to learning, I mean working.
"
. Or, listen to the sounds and associate the sounds with the character, and not use any form of transliteration at all. That is sure to gaijinise your already gaijinised accent.
