For those of us who have studied Japanese to a pretty advanced level, a big problem is idiomatic phrases. Even though we understand every word in a sentence, we might not understand the sentence at all because words are being used in an "odd" way. Most of the time, this is because the sentence contains an idiomatic set-phrase.

Watching My Boss My Hero in Japanese, i encountered the sentence:
向こうは腐るほど金を持っている香港一の成金マフィアだ。

While I could see every word in the sentence and understood all the grammar, 腐るほど金 made little sense to me. "A rotting amount of money". I could GUESS the idiomatic meaning, but I wanted to be sure. Using google I found the point of this whole post:

http://www.geocities.jp/tomomi965/index2.html

A japanese dictionary of idiomatic phrases! If you go into く for example, you can find 腐るほど and there's a LOT more. Seems like a great source, both for help when translating and as a mining spot for interesting definitions.

EDIT: It should be noted that sanseido contains this idiomatic phrase under 腐る, but that doesn't make the site any less useful

Last edited by Tobberoth (2008 October 14, 6:35 pm)