I know word lists are only so useful, but this is mostly out of curiosity. I'm wondering if anyone has tried running any monolingual Japanese dictionaries through some sort of word frequency counter. (Specifically word definitions.) I mean, if you focused on learning the words that describe other words, wouldn't it be easier to go monolingual? Just a thought.

Edit: I guess other questions to ask, do you think you would find such a thing helpful?

What kind of dictionaries did you have in mind? If you have one, try running it through cb4960's generator?

Maybe just use one vocabulary list to generate a list of definitions, then run that?

I think if you have to do that, you're not ready to rely exclusively on J-J (I still don't see why you ever have to do that, but maybe that's a different thread).

If you want to get experience with how J-J dictionaries describe things, look up words you already know the meaning of.

nest0r, to be honest I'm not even sure what kinda dictionaries we have available for mining from. But that vocab list seems like a good way to test things out.

yudantaiteki, I was hoping my shpeel about knowing that wordlists aren't the most useful and it being mostly curiosity would of avoided your type of response. I never said this is how I wanted to learn, but it might be interesting to see what we get out of it. I've seen the whole bit about look up words you know about before. Which certainly has it's uses and has been helpful to me before.

Stardict has multiple monolingual Japanese dictionaries, and the option to copy to .txt. It might be a bit painstaking, but you could run the mouse over a list of words in a .txt file, perhaps one based on the most frequent words of [insert source here], sending each pop-up definition to a .txt, I suppose.

Or you could use the Japanese to Japanese option for this tool that parses and brings up definitions, then copy/paste them to a .txt for cb4960's frequency list generator: http://language.tiu.ac.jp/tools_e.html