I read "A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar" cover to cover when I was starting out and it was useful I think.

Take this advice with a grain of salt because I don't know what other stuff my dad did to learn English so well, but he is an Iranian native speaker. He speaks fluent English, better than most natives with an extensive vocab and no accent whatsoever, and I know he read an American dictionary at least once.

zachandhobbes Wrote:Take this advice with a grain of salt because I don't know what other stuff my dad did to learn English so well, but he is an Iranian native speaker. He speaks fluent English, better than most natives with an extensive vocab and no accent whatsoever, and I know he read an American dictionary at least once.

Similar thing happened with my dad, he learned English by reading a lot and listening a lot (always listen to news, like always). So this definitely tells me reading/listening are a powerful tool in learning another language)

I think a number of you seem to be missing the point! The point here is *not* to try to remember each of the words in the dictionary.

Yes, I would remember each word better if I wrote it down. Yes, I would probably gain more from it if I was doing it with a dictionary in a language I already know. What's your point? I don't come to this site to be reminded that I might pick things up a little better if I did them in English instead...

I would remember each word even better than that if I reviewed it with flashcards or better yet, in an SRS....but I am already doing vocabulary in Anki! This is just an experimental supplement - not a focus for my study.

The entire point of this is to take advantage of reading the sheer volume of example sentences provided in this particular dictionary.

I imagine over the course of that I'll start to notice certain patterns in them. Even a very short way into my quest I've started to notice a bit more how -te verbs work.

If I don't, then hey, at least I spent a bunch of time doing *something* in Japanese, and I'll have become a little bit more comfortable reading...as I said I'm already starting to find that I'm not having to slowly sound out a bunch of words I had to a day ago.

Oh, and as for doing the whole thing in a monolingual dictionary, yeah, I plan on switching over to using (just for reference, but not for reading cover-to-cover) a monolingual dictionary shortly after I'm done with RTK...this is just a way to ease the transition and get me used to dealing with a variety of example sentences in Japanese in the meantime.

If you're just looking for exposure to example sentences, I don't see how a dictionary provides anything useful or interesting there that you couldn't get more richly from other resources.

But I like the idea of just poring over a reference guide that is arranged in a non-narrativized way according to whatever strikes your fancy at a given moment, as a supplement.

Although doing it for an entire dictionary seems arbitrary. Perhaps others undertaking a similar project might prefer doing it with hypertext. Devoting a period each day to semantically, addictively browse through entries via links within the text, tvtropes/Wikipedia style. Perhaps tracking their reading with some extension, but not trying to explicitly retain or SRS it.

Edit: By the way, is there a Japanese equivalent to Encyclopedia Brown? Seems I might have come across it before but I can't remember at the moment.

I really like your idea of doing it with hypertext...you know, I never really thought of that. I was just looking at my available reading materials and thinking "what could I read.." but actually doing it online seems like an interesting idea...

So far things are going fairly well with it, although I didn't do as much as I wanted to yesterday due to feeling really under the weather. I'll get back to it as soon as I'm feeling a little better.

that's awesome.

everyone says it's boring, but hey if it's fun for you then go at it.

beside sall that everyone said you won't really know how to pronouce the japanese words. like recently i found out this korean site for ppl learning japanese/chinese/french/maybe more offers audio of the words.

http://jpdic.naver.com/mini_search.nhn?q...3%E8%82%BA
I really recommend it if you're like me at a level where you can tell the difference between like koutei vs. kotei just like stuff that you'd start noticing once you pick up enough words/listen to enough japanese.

A good part is you can just paste like a list of words like

致死
芳醇
風鈴
和平
了承
国賓
飽和
苦痛
幾多
安易
交友
心肺
(out of this the one that i was most curious about the pronounciation is wahei another one that is not on this list is ronri since I can only pronounce it as "lonely" no matter what I try to do psychologically)
and it'll just have all the words together in the result with the prnounciation button.

i wanted to share this site on the most appropriate thread but the search function is not very good. so i will share here.

I actually think it's a bad idea for two reasons:

One is that the primary problems encountered with language learning are burn out, having enough time to invest, motivation, etc. Anyone who can stay devoted and keep working hard will eventually be able to learn the language they want to learn. What's difficult is keeping yourself interested long enough for fluency, especially in times when your life gets busy. Seems to me that if you're reading a dictionary early on you're starting with a very hard task with a very high learning curve, so burn out is a likely result of all this.

The other reason is that the example sentences in dictionaries aren't as useful as other types of sentences. If you read a book in Japanese, or a manga, EVERY sentence is an example sentence. Especially when you're a beginner and you're learning a new word almost every sentence. But the major advantage is that all the sentences are put together in a single context. So you get to see how the sentences refer to earlier ideas, when to use what kind of connection phrases, how tense is used in storytelling(often very different than English), you can see cultural ideas that are found in Japanese fiction, and so on. I don't think a dictionary can teach you this kind of thing nearly as well.

Also, books have more repetition, since often words need to be reused after encountering them, since the book is describing an ongoing situation.

So, basically, I think reading a dictionary is just as hard a task as reading a book, but with fewer benefits. However, if you did one of the grammar dictionaries I would think differently, since I think you would learn a lot more that way.

I'm not telling you not to do it--I wish you luck. But my prediction is that you will give up of your own accord in a couple of weeks.

LunaSlave Wrote:I think a number of you seem to be missing the point! The point here is *not* to try to remember each of the words in the dictionary.

Yes, I would remember each word better if I wrote it down. Yes, I would probably gain more from it if I was doing it with a dictionary in a language I already know. What's your point? I don't come to this site to be reminded that I might pick things up a little better if I did them in English instead...

Well, I think the point would be this is not a good way to learn the language, which was the goal you stated in your opening post. Of course it `doesnt hurt` to read it all the way through, but it will probably take 100+ hours, which is time that could have been better spent reading actual books.

But, if you dont have a full-time job and are currently incarcerated like Malcolm was, knock yourself out.