Hi Everyone,

I've finally completed part 1 of RTK and have been watching and listening to native content off and on for a couple years. But I've recently started to really get serious and will likely push to the end of RTK this year :-) while making sure not to burn out.

My question has to do with dictionaries. Currently I am using Katoba on my iPhone which is an Edict derivative. I have herd many great things about the Green Goddess (J-E) in the Dai form (non abridged). I have also herd great things about the Daijirin (J-J). And have done some reading on the AJATT method and various similar topics and would like to move monolingual as soon as it can be sustained.

So, given that pocket books are only so big, and the Green Goddess is so expensive, and that my eventual goal is to go monolingual, does anyone have recommendations? Should I spring for the Green Goddess? About $200 for EPWING format or both the Daijirin and the Green Goddess for about $320? Or maybe get the Daijirin and Eijiro (edited by JLT for more simplicity and ease of use) and an in between cost maybe around $250? Or go really cheap and just get the Eijiro for around $60 to $100? I realize Eijiro is not as good as a real dictionary and that the examples are sometimes constructed with unnatural Japanese (a really big concern of mine).

How long will I be using a J-E dictionary realistically? Should I just use the online versions and suffer through EDICT horror?

I should note that EPWING format is very appealing to me for its ability to be used on all my devices and because it is very portable.

Thank you for any and all help.

You may have to take my advice with a grain of salt because I don't like the whole "monolingual only" idea. The choice of dictionary depends somewhat on what you want to do. I would say that if you're dead-set on doing monolingual, EDICT might be OK until that point. $200 is pretty expensive for the GG but it is a very good dictionary. If you're planning on getting a handheld electronic dictionary at some point, it should have the GENIUS on it which is a pretty good J-E and you can get the whole thing for cheaper than $200.

What I did was use EDICT until I got an electronic; since then I use both the Koujien (J-J) and the GENIUS (J-E). I've never seen any benefit to avoiding the J-E entirely. I still don't always understand the J-J definitions as well as the J-E ones.

Monolingual is helpful as some definitions/different kanji are listed as having the same definition(J-E). While monolingual gives a different story. That's one reason why we should use monolingual. Or at least get used to it at one point in time.

I would like a dictionary for Iphone that is monolingual but have had no luck.

I didn't like monolingual dictionaries when I first started out. It only caused more confusion and I would just get into endless loops and never figure out what I wanted to figure out.

Now that I have a better grasp of Japanese, monolingual works, but there are still holes in my vocabulary and some definitions are difficult to understand.

For vocabulary dictionaries, I've never found any reason to use anything outside of AEdict or jisho.org for J-E, and goo.ne.jp for J-J. Plus, they're free. You can find better uses for $200. =)

I don't know why people are so obsessed with monolingual only, especially beginners. They're relying on their poor reading ability to understand words. Can you really say that's more reliable than an English translation? Is the exponential amount of extra time you spend looking at definitions and the confusion the unknown language brings on really going to revolutionise the way you learn vocabulary? This is something you might want to consider when making flashcards too, so you don't end up with 800 characters of cascading monolingual definitions to "help" you learn the word 椅子.

If Kotoba has example sentences, then there's no reason to stop using it. If it doesn't, check out 'Japanese'. It's a bit more expensive, but it has a number of advantages that make it worth it. There's a lot of value in J-E translations, as long as you're aware that you're not always getting like-for-like. If you're not sure or want further information/examples, then switch to Daijirin (costs about £10). If you then, for some reason, find this combination lacking in some way, then start considering spending an insane amount of money on Green Goddess, but I don't think that will ever become an issue

You seem to be just beginning. I wonder how long it'll take until you get to a J-J mode where you feel comfortable learning the words?
I still use J-E quite often, as GG is a pretty awesome dictionary. If I'm just doing some light reading that doesn't matter too much, I'll still use rikaichan when I need (plus they make easy vocab cards).

For J-J, I personally like the dictionary at http://www.sanseido.net/ because it's concise, free, and simple.
I also like Daijirin (daijisen?), which I have the EPWING version on my phone. But they also have an app, right? The one with the relatively concise definitions.
I think the koujien is a little too dense -- especially for a beginner.

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:I would like a dictionary for Iphone that is monolingual but have had no luck.

Enter 大辞林

astendra Wrote:

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:I would like a dictionary for Iphone that is monolingual but have had no luck.

Enter 大辞林

awesome thanks good to know.

ilffreg Wrote:Hi Everyone,
How long will I be using a J-E dictionary realistically? Should I just use the online versions and suffer through EDICT horror?

What is this EDICT horror I keep reading about? I use EDICT in rikaichan/jisho.org, Green Goddess on my casio jisho and the Progressive dic on yahoo, all on a daily basis. When I can't find an expression, idiom or grammar structure in the GG or Progressive, the first thing I do is check EDICT, which almost never lets me down (there is always eijiro and the wife as a last resort).

While the definitions and examples in GG give a more nuanced understanding of a word, the EDICT information is enough in 99% of the cases to understand the kind of literature you will be reading in the next 6-12 months. And when you are looking for reliable example sentences to put into anki, the yahoo/progressive combo can't be beat for convenience.

Just because something is free, it isn't necessarily bad. Quite the opposite -- check out this newfangled website called wikipedia something or other.

Splurging ten bucks for the Japanese or Midori apps to upgrade from Kotoba might be a worthwhile investment, but don't spend more until you start running up against the limitations of EDICT. It's quite possible when that happens you will be ready for a J-J dictionary (you can easily check on Goo/Yahoo/Sanseido/etc. if that is already the case -- but it won't be for a good long while regardless of what you may have heard).

(detour: I haven't used Kotoba for a while, but when I switched to codefromtokyo's Japanese app, Kotoba didn't offer furigana and hotlinking for the example sentences, and didn't have vocabulary lists; pretty critical features. Now Midori might be a better choice because it has true Japanese handwriting input - but I've never tried it, so I can't vouch for its usability.)

If you decide to get the GG anyway, make sure your EPWING reader and the dictionary file supports jumps (to look up words a dictionary article and to get the readings for the words in the example sentences), and copy-paste to move stuff into anki or to another dictionary app. Without those features it will be a pain to use. (The EPWING setup I've seen on a friend's phone was pretty unusable, but I don't know if it was his fault or some other factor.)

You can also consider getting the iPhone GreenGoddess app for $110, which is cheaper and may have more functionality than an EPWING combo (but I'm not sure about handwriting input). Or if you have a friend in Japan, you can ask him to look for a sale that has last year's Casio model with Green Goddess - which might also fit into the $200 budget.

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:

astendra Wrote:

NoSleepTilFluent Wrote:I would like a dictionary for Iphone that is monolingual but have had no luck.

Enter 大辞林

awesome thanks good to know.

sweet stuff

I have a electronic dictionary, just a Casio EX-word. It has two monolingual dictionaries (広辞苑 and 明鏡), a J-E dictionary, two E-J dictionaries, as well as a million other dictionaries (wine, movies, Japanese manners). It's also faster to use than an iPhone or iPod, and it cost me a little over $200. Wouldn't that be a better option?

If you have money to spend then get a real electronic dictionary.

I agree with the above. Just get yourself a decent electronic dictionary. Mine includes decent J>E, E>J, J>J, a bunch of phrase books, encyclopedia of historical terms etc and importantly a pen for inputing kanji. I got it for about 15000yen in Akihabara. You can also buy additional dictionaries for it in the form of an SD card. I bought an additional card loaded with a bunch of chinese>J and J>Chinese dictionaries for about 5000yen. If I had just bought this when I first started, I would have spent zero dollars on paper dictionaries. They're well worth the money.
Also I'm going to second what everyone is saying about monolingual. It strikes me as a huge waste of time for beginners.

take your time with monolingual. Try it with some basic definitions and see if you can understand it. It really get's easier as you keep learning more japanese,

Thank you everyone for your help! I am convinced that buying a single, super expensive dictionary is not worth the money. I had previously looked into an electronic dictionary but thought they went for around $500. I think I'll still wait longer for one of those though, I really like only having to carry one device (my phone) even if it takes a little longer to load.

As a few steps better than Kotoba, I bought EBPocket for the iPhone. It has jump capability and can even search on yahoo and other external dictionaries. I'm not sure, but it almost looks like if I had 大辞林 installed it would look there too, so that might be an option at some later time. But as many of you pointed out, why should I bother right now, as my vocabulary is very limited. I'm much more pleased with the results I'm getting with EBPocket than I was with Kotoba.

Note: I've tried using the online versions of dictionaries before and get pretty confused sense there is very little, if any, English. Guess that just goes to show I'm not ready for monolingual ;-)

I highly recommend an iPhone/iPod and Midori + one of the monolinguals. That way you have something portable that does more than a dictionary, plus the dictionaries for ~$30.