Hi there! I'm trying to learn Japanese using something similar to the AJATT method - except not nearly as hardcore - there's still lots of English-only time in my life.

I'm currently on the "Remembering the Kanji" phase, and even before I'm finished with learning kanji, I've decided upon a little experiment.

I'm going to read an entire Japanese-English dictionary (the Basic Japanese-English Dictionary from the Japan Foundation) cover to cover, all 923 pages of entries.

Interestingly, I was inspired to try this after watching the movie Malcolm X and seeing the scene with him in jail, copying the dictionary out an entry at a time.

Unlike Malcolm, I'm not writing anything down along the way other than on a twitter feed to keep track of my progress. I'll also make brief observations there as well. I'm not going to make any concerted effort to memorize specific entries, either. If I was trying to memorize them, I'd make cards in Anki or something for each entry, but I'm far too lazy for that!

I'm just going to read the word, the English definition, and all of the example sentences in each entry, maybe a couple times over as I go in order to allow the words and sentences to sink in a bit before I move on. That's it. My current understanding of Japanese is quite limited - I know little bits here and there but not very much. I am actually really wondering if this process will change that at all. If so, awesome - if not, no harm done as it's an interesting experiment and hopefully others can gain some insight from it. Honestly, I think the sheer volume of input will help a lot.

The dictionary in question has lots of furigana to help me understand in places where I can't understand the kanji, and it also has English translations on the other side of the page. I'm going to try to avoid the romaji wherever I can.

The more followers I have on here and the more interest this can generate, the more inspired I'll be to carry it through to the end so if you're interested to see how this turns out, please follow me on twitter @ my new account:

jpncover2cover

Thanks!

I am starting to do that as well. I am an aural learner, and I am recording the Oxford Starter Japanese dictionary (the english-japanese section has only 200 pages) in 30 minutes chunks, which I listen on my mp3 player whenever I go to the gym of take a walk. I read the english entry, then pause for 5 seconds and read the japanese translation. So everything is in production mode.

I think it is indeed a very helpful activity. 1000 pages will take you forever, though, and without any repetition (SRS of mp3 like I do), I am afraid that you won't remember much. Over-exposure through repetition is key to learning.

I'm sorry, but this sounds like the most boring way of learning Japanese ever...

Yeah, an interesting experiment, but I think this probably a terrible way of going about things. Probably worse than that all-Chinese-TV guy, because you won't be getting any repetition, except for what (might) come up in the example sentences.

I read this post earlier, but didn't want to be the first one to post a negative reply, but yea, I am not sure if I have ever heard of a more boring way to learn Japanese. All that work and you will still not be able to speak the language or understand it when it is spoken to you.

Why would you want to do that? You say your knowledge is limited, you only know some basics, thus: You will most likely be able to read the entries. But what with memorizing, learning something, being able to analyze the sentences - structure, grammar, etc. You are not able to do that. You could also read through a book about cooking. Without prior knowledge how to cook, and not wanting to cook after you read it, you will realize it's a waste of time.

My point is, learn how to use those words, learn about sentence structures, gain more knowledge in the language and use a dictionary to learn new words, or cement those you know already - in the context of new sentences. Also you will be able to USE what you are learning, once you acquire some more knowledge through either books, or online learning.

What you would want to do with a dictionary is to enrich your vocabulary. With the explanations that follow a dictionary entry, you could gain some more knowledge. Pre position, post position, some grammar and so on. But to make the most of it, you could even go so far as to look up the etymology of a word, get more information in a Thesaurus, look for synonyms, antonyms etc. Citations to add context to that word, look for similar words, phrases, idioms, derived terms, inflections ... You could even hop on Wikipedia to look for entries on the words to get even more sentences, information, and what not.

It is all about making the most of all the material you have. In context, and with other learning materials, as well as what you already know, you can gain more knowledge, and add new words, and being able to apply that acquired knowledge.

If you are still convinced that you want to read a dictionary from front to back, without making any effort to analyze anything, or to memorize, you can do that. But you will come to realize that you could have done other, more meaningful things with your time, to further your knowledge in the language.

There are two ways you can do this:

Read each entry in the dictionary from あ to ん in order. Eventually you'll read them all.

Rearrange the entries in your dictionary so that the words form sentences and the sentences make a story, and read the entries in that order. Eventually you'll read them all.

I agree with the others. It's better to spend your time doing something that will best help you progress with the language, rather than something that will get you more followers on Twitter. If you're lucky, you'll remember 5% of what you read. You'd probably get more out of reading a grammar dictionary from cover to cover, but without review you're not going to remember much in any case.

if you are going to read a dictionary from front to back, I would recommend that dictionary be something like The Kanji Learners Dictionary. It would certainly help develop your understanding of individual kanji meanings.

I started doing something similar with the japanese dictionary for Nintendo DS.
Whenever I am stuck with nothing else to do, I just whip it out and start going through it.
I usually just read the Japanese word and the english definition, so I can move quickly. And when I come across a word that I think is interesting, I'll look at it in more detail, and possibly bookmark it for later study.

It's actually NOT as boring as it would sound (especially if you have nothing better to do), because you can come across very interesting words at a fairly quick pace.

逢引 - sneak dating
悪妻 - bad wife
雨男 - a person who is always followed by rain

All this and much more, just from the あ’ｓ　：）

I used to do that when I was starting out, if you're the type of person who likes to flip through English dictionaries/encyclopedias for fun, in search of new interesting words, then you'll likely find it's a fun thing to do in your spare time.

Hey LunaSlave, nice initiative.
I'm a bit sceptical too about how useful that is going to be regarding your learning of Japanese (reading a monolingual Japanese dictionary, now that would be an AJATT challenge), but my credo is to never give up no matter what everybody else says, so good luck! Let us know how it turns out.

I would suggest reading the grammar dictionary instead of a word-dictionary...least more interesting to me.

Lol, interesting idea. Iverson would love you! Seriously though, why not? If you like it and your reading it often enough, you are likely to get enough repetitions of the most common words to make it worthwhile. By the way, don't hesitate to look up words in those example sentences. Something like that will help a lot. And if you can get a grammar dictionary to look up some of the basic structures as you go along (DOJBG, for instance) then you'd be killing two birds with one stone.

Anyway, GL!

Cranks Wrote:Lol, interesting idea. Iverson would love you! Seriously though, why not? If you like it and your reading it often enough, you are likely to get enough repetitions of the most common words to make it worthwhile. By the way, don't hesitate to look up words in those example sentences. Something like that will help a lot. And if you can get a grammar dictionary to look up some of the basic structures as you go along (DOJBG, for instance) then you'd be killing two birds with one stone.

Anyway, GL!

I second the idea of reading a grammar dictionary (to help with the grammar in the dictionary, or cover to cover if you're interested). I'm currently reading a grammar book meant for Japanese teachers called 中上級を教える人のための日本語文法ハンドブック and I'm really enjoying it, it's pretty fascinating stuff.

So...I'm actually very appreciative for the feedback here, positive and negative.

I've just spent my first session reading from the dictionary. I've noticed several things just from this!

I'm actually understanding a fair number of the sentences without looking at the english. Not all of them, but a number of them.

Just in one session of reading today I'm picking up on some interesting kanji combinations that I didn't know about, just by recognizing kanji I've learned thus far through RTK. I was pleased to learn that Hokkaido really just stands for "North Sea Road." I was amused to learn that there are so many different ways to use the verb ageru in its various forms. And I noticed that where words have repeated themselves in the example sentences, including ones with kanji I didn't know before or didn't know the pronunciation of before, I've become much faster at just seeing them and reading them by recognizing their shapes and not just sounding them out. Now that's all in a single session.

Keep in mind, everyone, that in no way am I suggesting that this is the ideal way to learn on its own. I'm doing RTK, SRS reps of core 2k, listening and watching a bunch of stuff, as well as just using the dictionary to look up various things. I'm also glancing here and there at Tae Kim's grammar guide, although I intend to go through that from beginning to end once I'm done with RTK 1.

One area where I really haven't done a lot is reading books! I have this handy, it has things I might pick up along the way and it's full of furigana and english translations i can glance at after reading the sentences and trying to figure out the meaning from that. It's like checking my answers.

I seriously can't see any good reason why reading it on top of what I'm already doing is a bad idea. No, it's not going to build long-term retention of all the items like SRS would. but honestly, so far it seems like nothing but good, and while the concept might be boring for some of you, thus far it's keeping my interest.

Remember, if you'd like to follow my progress - jpncover2cover on twitter

Ok, feeling motivated, maybe I'll have a bit of a read of my kids dictionary. It's monolingual and about 2000 odd pages. Should be entertaining (as a side thing).

as long as it's fun it should be okay...

yeah except theres a difference in the situation regarding malcom x and you. First of all Malcolm X was already fluent in English, you are not fluent in Japanese. Secondly he was using a monolingual dictionary, and you are not.

I'm sure that writing things down is how Malcolm X managed to remember most of it.

kazelee Wrote:Writing things down is how Malcolm X managed to remember most of it.

Another reason why I love my production deck(active recall from memory but writing everything down=solid memory of it in both in reading/writing form)

I had an English student once who studied a lot from the dictionary. His vocab was pretty good but grammar was terrible. Kinda predictable really.

His dictionary gave words a rating on how common they were which was pretty useful.

I recon doing this with a kids dictionary would be best if you're a beginner. (and you really want to study this way)

I KNOW I read somewhere long ago about some guy who decided to read Oxford English dictionaries from beginning to end all at once and ended up having brain damages or something. Maybe they weren't severe damages, but it proved to be counter productive anyways :lol:
If you go slowly once in a while and add stuff to your SRS deck, why not? I look up words and find contexts for them on Twitter or something, and I don't think it's too boring. Pretty effective.

I'm not a beginner, but if you count going through all the common words on the jdict list (22k or so words I think? could be wrong though), then I'm nearing the end of doing this just to beef up my vocabulary base.

It only takes me around 20 minutes to do reviews and learn 50 new words each day so it's not really much bother. I look at example sentences for words that need context to understand as I go along.

@LunaSlave, did you hear about the guy who read the entire Oxford English Dictionary (21,730 pages). Took him a year, I think. You have to love words to do this. Maybe you can pick up some tips from him:

http://www.ammonshea.com/oed.html