Hi everyone!
I´m currently working my way through KO2001, and I sometimes struggle with looking up words, because I don´t know what to search for.
Maybe it´s just my bad grammar, but take this sentence for example:

渡り鳥がどうやって方向を知るか、よく分かっていない。

I wanted to look up the last part (よく分かっていない), to find out the meaning, but where do I start?
I have the English translation in KO2001 as a crutch (it´s supposed to be something along the lines of "unknown", but I do want to be able to use the dictionary efficiently. How can I attack these problems?
Simple words without any fancy conjugations are no problem, obviously, but when they´re conjugated and/or a word has several meanings, what can I do?
I feel especially lost when there´s many meanings to a word.
Of course, I could just rely 100% on the English translation in KO2001, but I don´t want to do that, as I´ve experienced several places that the English translation doesn´t give the exact meaning of the sentence, and... well, I don´t want to rely on it too much! =)

Thank you guys for your help and patience!
A few tips from you dictionary-heroes would be highly appreciated!!

Sincerely,
Zorlee..

Zorlee Wrote:I wanted to look up the last part (よく分かっていない), to find out the meaning, but where do I start?

I think after a lot of practice you'll realize it's よく　＋　分かる　＋　いる, and be able to look them up with relative ease. As a process to look up things, I recommend a dictionary where you can write kanji/kana in, and it'll auto-fill for you.

For example my electronic dictionary. If I type in よ, there's a bazillion hits, then add く the first hit is "fully". Then go on to the next word, I'll write in 分 and I get too many hits. Add か, and a few entries down (the first verb) I see 分かる - Understand.

I'm sure somebody else will come along and link/explain how to make verbs go into other forms, but I don't know how it works. It's been all subconscious for as long as I can remember, and everybody will get a "feel" for it eventually. I think.

Well, it's easier to separate the words if you already know the vocab, but that doesn't help when you're just starting out, does it?

The general rule is that words start with kanji and might have an ending in kana. So, a kana -> kanji transition usually marks a word break:

よく分かってない

く分 looks like a good place to split a word, so try to lookup よく, which is in fact a word.


分かってない is a single kanji followed by a mess of kana, which usually means a verb or i-adjective, possible followed by helping verbs or i-adjectives. These word forms are fairly messy--the dictionary form is often different from what you see in text. Eventually, you'll learn how to convert them to dictionary form. (Tae Kim's guide is pretty good for learning this.)

For example, this one might be.
分かる
分かう
分かつ
in te-form (since って -> る、う、つ te form is similar ta form here) plus the auxiliary ない. But, you can make it easy by using http://jisho.org/words?jap=%E5%88%86%E3%...dict=edict to convert it to dictionary form: 分かる.

So, the word breaks are
よく　分かって　ない

And, in dictionary form,
いい　分かる　いる

That last one requires a bit more explanation. ない is normally the negative of ある; the negative of いる is いない. However, the tearu form can only be used with transitive verbs--and 分かる is intransitive. 分かってる is an abbreviation for the teiru form, わかっている, and thus
分かってない is short for 分かっていない.

This is why a good grasp of basic grammar is essential when you are starting out. Don't listen to people who say you shouldn't directly study grammar, you'll just give yourself a handicap at the beginning. If you know what conjugations look like then you'd know that:

よく is the adverbial conjugation of 良い
分かって is the て form of 分かる
いない is the auxiliary verb 居る in negative conjugation

Even if you don't know what any of those words mean, you would be able to look them up at that point.

Jarvik7 Wrote:This is why a good grasp of basic grammar is essential when you are starting out. Don't listen to people who say you shouldn't directly study grammar, you'll just give yourself a handicap at the beginning. If you know what conjugations look like then you'd know that:

I agree.

If you don't want to worry about putting everything into a browser for rikaichan then a good program might be wakan. http://wakan.manga.cz/

I believe that wakan only works on PC, but maybe there's a Mac version I don't know about. The nice thing about it is that it can figure out what a verb is even if it is conjugated (though some of the weirder ways of adding endings to verbs don't always register). If you type　分かって in, it will throw out 分かる and its definition as a possibility. So when you get a string of text that you can't figure out, you can try breaking it up in various places to see if you find anything.

Sometimes, however, you'll just need to know the grammar. In this case even with a dictionary it will be very hard to understand without some grammar. You need to at least know verbて　＋　いない pattern, which shows why grammar is important. (よく also uses some grammar to make an adjective into an adverb, but many learners dictionaries have it in this form anyway, so you could get by without knowing the grammar in this case).

A dictionary where you can write in kanji can also be very useful. Sometimes things are just easier to look up that way, and of course there are the cases where there is no ふりがな.

Zorlee Wrote:I wanted to look up the last part (よく分かっていない), to find out the meaning, but where do I start?

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-b...dic.cgi?9T

Man, I really should mine more grammar points... BUT until then - rikaichan is a lifesaver! Thank you! It made everything much easier! =)