I've been planning to start sentence mining and another thread pointed out this rather useful website: http://www.coscom.co.jp/newsweather/weather/index.html.

So I started off and immediately hit problems :-)

This is all (I assume) pretty basic stuff and maybe I'm trying to run before I can walk (I started learning properly about 3 months ago) but maybe I'm just missing something obvious.

So the first sentence is:

今週 は 全体 的 に 晴れ の 日 が 続きます。

(Ignore the funny spacing - I add the kanji version and then the kana version and space them out so I can see what's what ... I'm only ~90 kanji into RTK!)

今週 is "this week"
続きます is "to continue" (which only just popped up tonight on memrise, yay!)

Now it gets tricky for me.
全体 "all, whole, entirety"
的 "-like, typical"
晴れ "clear weather"
日 "day(s)"

plus a sprinkling of particles.

So I end up with:

This week (all) (like/typical?) clear weather day will continue unbroken.

It seems to basically be saying "All this week the weather will continue to be fine" but I'm not sure what 的 is doing in there nor why 晴れの日 means "the days will be clear" (if indeed it actually means anything like that.

I suspect that I should stick to mining sources with an available translation, at least for now. But I'd appreciate some pointers just to be going along with, please.

Learn Japanese grammar.
Maybe try Tae Kim's guide for Japanese.

put that one off for a while. in the beginning i'd recommend dic.yahoo.co.jp's Japanese-English dictionary... it gives you tons of simple example sentences with translations.

yeah... you shouldn't even put that in your deck at this point. you shouldn't even have an anki deck at this point? just enjoy japanese.
you don't know any of the words? but even so it should like one word you don't know or maybe 2 if the sentence is that goood....

go learn some lyrics with rikai-chan... or something.

Yeah, that site is quite hard for beginners.

I also recommend grammar study, as well as going through more of RTK.

You cannot learn words from EDICT.
EDICT will tell you what part of speech a word is, and a bunch of potential English translations - in no particular order, and without regard to context, and without explaining their grammatical nuances.
You -especially- cannot learn grammatical words like てき・らしい・みたい・だけ・なら from EDICT. Japanese has an enormous number of grammatical words - it's extremely liberal in word order, so of necessity, it has more grammatical words than a language that takes grammatical meaning from word order (like English).

You can, of course, learn words from a combination of EDICT and context - if you understand all the other words in a sentence and the grammar in a sentence, then the EDICT offering may be enough. However, until you are at that point, you should study words in a controlled context (ie, a grammar text or similar), or study words from a verbose and professionally edited Japanese-English dictionary. dic.yahoo.co.jp and dictionary.goo.ne.jp are available, but you'll quickly find that almost all Japanese-English dictionaries are written for native Japanese learning English. You'll outgrow it quickly - within a year probably - but nontheless, kodansha's furigana dictionary is probably a good investment since it -is- designed for native English speakers learning Japanese. It'll also provide plenty of sentences that you could put in your SRS though of course, without any larger context as they are dictionary sentences.

The Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar is also extremely good to have around, and an excellent source of sentences. (If you like taking sentences from DoBJG enough, you can just download the deck, but it does apparently have a few errors that need to be corrected from the original text.)

> You cannot learn words from EDICT

Is that what rikaikun uses?

> You -especially- cannot learn grammatical words like てき

Currently I'm working through a dead-tree version of Japanese Step By Step. That doesn't have a very good index so I cannot be sure, but 的 doesn't seem to be in there. So where would I go next when I hit something I don't understand? JGram doesn't match anything and Tatoeba throws up 1000 hits, none of the first few pages of which looked any easier than the one that I stumbled over.

What would be a good J-E online dictionary to use? (DoBJG seems to be dead tree only - I may go ahead and pick one up like that but online access to English, Italian and French dictionaries has spoiled me over the years and I'm not sure I can go back to that slow a look-up procedure, especially for Japanese).

Yes, that's what rikai kun/chan/sama use. Check out wwwjdic sometime, there are other resources associated with it.
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/cgi-b...dic.cgi?1C
I don't want to come down to hard on EDICT - it's a great resource, and without it we wouldn't have the rikai plugins. But what pops up on rikai simply isn't a thorough definition, and too many beginners try to read something by taking the first word that rikai provides as they mouse over each word and end up doing themselves a disservice, randomly picking a word from the list of EDICT definitions for each Japanese word and ending up with a jumble.

I like the Shogakukan Progressive dictionary for JE, which is available through yahoo's japanese page. But it doesn't provide readings for the kanji, which can make the examples hard for a beginner to follow. If you don't mind looking up yet more words to understand the word you were first looking up, it still may help.

The Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar is more of a grammar reference than a dictionary, although the majority of the book is an alphabetical order listing of grammatical words or patterns. You're looking up grammar not words, so it feels quite different from looking up words in a paper dictionary. Not sure where my copy is right this second, so I can't look up the 的 entry (I'm pretty sure there is one...)

Progressive's 的：
http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8...x=02892900
Progressive's 全体：
http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?p=%E5%85%...=0&dtype=3

Which includes the possibly useful example sentence,
この地方の人々は全体 (的) に勤勉だ
「In general [Generally speaking], the people of this district are hard-working.

Many terms ending in 的 have their own subheading, but not in the case of 全体的. Your text almost certainly uses some 的 terms but probably just treats them as vocabulary words.

I don't know if Kodansha's Furigana Dictionary can be gotten electronically, but I'm pretty sure it's not freely available on a web site. A digital version of that would be pretty ideal for a beginner - while it's not as detailed as other JE dictionaries its examples are more approachable both because they're meant for the foreign learner of Japanese and because they have furigana. I used the paper version quite a lot when I was a beginner.

I've found that over the years that I've been studying Japanese, I tend to collect books, simply because there just isn't one really great source for looking things up like this. It's frustrating, but that's just how it is.

One the upside, as I learn stuff, I can slowly get rid of them. (I should get rid of my N2 stuff, really.)

I found a pretty decent definition for -的 in CosCom's Kanji Odyssey vol. 1, it's kanji #465. They use the definition of -al/-cal, based on 技術(technology) becomes 技術的 (technical) and 個人(an individual) becomes 個人的 (personal). They put なs in brackets next to the words as well, indicating their possible use as なー adjectives as well.

One word I keep hearing a lot these days (and for some reason, I find annoying): 私的, which is kind of used in the same way that people use "for me" in English.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:The Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar is more of a grammar reference than a dictionary, although the majority of the book is an alphabetical order listing of grammatical words or patterns. You're looking up grammar not words, so it feels quite different from looking up words in a paper dictionary. Not sure where my copy is right this second, so I can't look up the 的 entry (I'm pretty sure there is one...)

I wandered through Blackwell's book shop today: they had both the Basic and Intermediate grammars, and teki isn't in the index for either, so far as I could see.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:Progressive's 的：
http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8...x=02892900

Which includes the possibly useful example sentence,

I've been collecting useful online resources, so I've no idea how I missed that one. Thanks. It looks to be perfect for sentence mining. I've just thrown in a few verbs that memrise has thrown at me and there are some perfect example sentences in there.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:I don't know if Kodansha's Furigana Dictionary can be gotten electronically, but I'm pretty sure it's not freely available on a web site. A digital version of that would be pretty ideal for a beginner - while it's not as detailed as other JE dictionaries its examples are more approachable both because they're meant for the foreign learner of Japanese and because they have furigana. I used the paper version quite a lot when I was a beginner.

Looks like it is paper only and no ebook available. No problem - I've got too much to read as it is :-)

It's funny. I was listening to some old JapanesePod101.com Intermediate/Upper Intermediate lessons, because I wanted to listen to something grammar-y while I was stuck in traffic, and the one I was listening to just happened to cover －的.　(Upper Intermediate Season 1, lesson 7, "The Doctor is In 3")

I think the dictionary on their site uses EDICT, though, because it gives the exact same definition as Rikai. Could be wrong about that, because some of the other stuff uses different definitions from EDICT. Kind of odd.

I got a subscription a while back when they had some kind of crazy cheap sale on them, because I can't find a good grammar podcast. (They cut the prices on subscriptions pretty often. Never pay retail.)

If you're looking for an online searchable grammar dictionary, their grammar bank is useful for someone who doesn't want paper books, and it's got 398 entries, all the way to some N1 level stuff. Entries also contain example sentences and audio. But again, you're subscribing to a service.

Even so, I like the intermediate level stuff, and I'm glad they brought the upper intermediate podcast back. They've done yojijukugo and particle podcast series, now I just wish they'd do a good keigo series.

全体的 means 'on the whole', or 'across the board'. I'd say that was basic vocab, so don't see why this sentence shouldn't be part of your deck other than the fact it's increadibly dull.

How many times have you said 'On the whole, the weather this week will continue to be clear/ sunny', in your daily life?

Don't give up on the sentences - they work for a lot of people - just find some that are easy enough for you and more importantly fun. Also, as a rule of thumb when you first start out I would only have one word or grammar point in each card that is new. Otherwise you're trying to learn too much at once.

Effective Japanese Usuage and the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar are great for looking points up. For vocab I use alc.co.jp because it gives lots of example sentences. As for where to go mining, it needs to be something memorable. Personally I found manga way too hard for starting off as it has way too much slang which you won't find in the above two books. I found the sentences from graded elementary school kanji drill books to be simple, straightforward and containing useful everyday vocab.

Hope that helps.

jankensan Wrote:Don't give up on the sentences - they work for a lot of people - just find some that are easy enough for you and more importantly fun. Also, as a rule of thumb when you first start out I would only have one word or grammar point in each card that is new. Otherwise you're trying to learn too much at once.

I've kept the sentences that gave me trouble, although I've looked for simpler ones for the future. The best one (for me) so far is http://jisho.org/ ... it even (apparently) orders the sentences by increasing length!

At the moment when I come across something that doesn't seem to be sticking in memrise, I go and find a suitable sentence, throw it into Anki and that seems to help. The interesting part is that it seems to help even though I'm not yet using my homebrew Anki sentences deck yet. Merely taking the time to come up with a sentence, copy it into Anki, add some kana hints for the Kanji and colour up the different parts of speech seems to take enough effort to fix most things in my brain without actually needing to work through the deck. (I will start on the deck once I get some more kanji and vocab under my belt, I'm just a little short of time right now).

I wouldn't use those sentences, or if I did, I would be *very* careful about how I did it. They're from the Tanaka Corpus, and, well, even the late Prof. Tanaka didn't really feel too enthusiastic about the quality of the sentences in the corpus.:

http://www.edrdg.org/wiki/index.php/Tanaka_Corpus

Or you can just Google "Tanaka Corpus" and find a bunch of stuff about it.

tl;dr: open source is great for software, not so much for Japanese Language dictionaries and sentence corpuses (corpii?)

If you want to use sentences from an online dictionary, that's fine. Use one that's professionally edited by native speakers, and also free as well. (Like the 2 JP-EN dictionaries at yahoo.co.jp.) Or use the version of EIJIRO that's maintained by ALC.

Sounds like you have the right idea! The main thing is to stay interested - don't kill it off with boring sentences. If a sentence becomes a leech, delete! I don't use the AJATT method myself, but one of Kazumoto's nuggets of gold is that you shouldn't wait to 'have more vocab' or 'the right materials', just dive in - and it sounds like you are doing this.

Vocab is what I struggle with most, and I've found the best solution is just to read read read. No amount of anki reps seems to help me, until I've seen a word 'in the wild' a few times, it just won't stick.

Be careful with jisho.org, I've spotted mistakes on there in the past - I can't recommend alc.co.jp highly enough in that respect.

Sorry, rich_f and I posted at the same time - I didn't mean to nag on jisho.org being a bit unreliable!

rich_f Wrote:Use one that's professionally edited by native speakers, and also free as well. (Like the 2 JP-EN dictionaries at yahoo.co.jp.) Or use the version of EIJIRO that's maintained by ALC.

I didn't realise that jisho.org used that corpus. The yahoo page looked a little "busy". If I go in via http://dic.search.yahoo.co.jp, write the kanji, hit the yellow button and pick the "green book" (JP-EN dictionary), I get a few meanings and maybe 3 or 4 sentences.

Am I on safe® ground now :-)

Thanks

The Yahoo dictionary pages are busier because there's more content there (and some advertising.)

If you look at the search bar at the top of the page, you can choose from 国語(JP-JP) 類語 (thesaurus, kind of) 英和 (EN-JP) 和英(JP-EN) and 辞書検索 (search all of the dictionaries.)

Or if you're lazy like me, just use Project Mycroft's website to add whatever dictionaries you feel like adding to the search bar in FireFox. I have Yahoo JP-EN, Yahoo search all, and ALC right in the search box in my browser. Saves a lot of time.

Also, when you're on the page for the word you're looking for (going JP-EN), look about 1/4 down the page, under the tabs you'll see:
和英辞書切り替え： プログレッシブ和英中辞典 | ニューセンチュリー和英辞典

和英辞書切り替え -> Switch JP-EN dictionaries (very useful)
プログレッシブ和英中辞典 -> Progressive JP-EN Intermediate Dictionary
ニューセンチュリー和英辞典-> New Century JP-EN Dictionary

The active dictionary is greyed out, and the other one you can switch to shows an active link. (If it's in there. It may not be, in which case it won't be available.) Click the link to look up the same search term in the other dictionary. You may have to go check the word list on the right to find the exact word you're looking for, if you're doing a vague search.

Happy hunting.