しあわせ

Basically there are three types available; paper; electronic; computer based. I find that I use all three. Paper ones are very useful but can be bulky to carry about and take time to search through. Electronic dictionaries are very convenient, can be carried about but can be expensive and complex to use. Computer based dictionaries have the speed of an electronic dictionary and can be much cheaper (if you already own a computer) but even on a laptop they are not exactly portable.

It is well worth having a couple of dictionaries. I’m surprised by some differences there can be sometimes in definitions and translations. So far JEDict is my favorite. However my Canon G55 is growing on me.

Paper Dictionaries
Electronic Dictionaries
Computer Dictionaries
Internet Dictionaries

What you tend to get with a paper dictionary is better editing and much easier to read entries. The down side is they are bulky to carry and slow to use compared to electronic methods. However I can’t do without them. Although I prefer an electronic dictionary, a paper version can sometimes be more useful; not least in that it’s easier to search for something that you’re not quite sure about and more satisfying to browse. I have two I would recommend.

Oxford Starter Japanese Dictionary

Oxford University Press

This is a good first dictionary. It does use kana to list Japanese entries which can be difficult at first but the sooner you learn kana the better. It also gives the kanji if you want to try using them. The biggest feature of this dictionary are the usage notes. In English to Japanese it will give pointers on idioms and phrases so that you can avoid a word for word un-natural translation. Most entries also have example sentences. There are additional usage notes and basic grammar in a central section.
A very useful dictionary.

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Kondansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary

Jack Halpern, (Kondansha International)

To learn kanji you can’t do better than this dictionary.

This dictionary has several methods of searching. The traditional Radical lookup method; an On Kun index, so if you know the pronunciation you can find the kanji (of course the number of homonyms is amazing); and the method by which the dictionary is organised — the SKIP method. The SKIP method classifies Kanji by pattern and stroke count of the sub-patterns. So its fairly easy to break down an unknown kanji and find it. Common mistakes are listed at the end of some entries to point you at the correct entry. There’s also an interesting listing of characters based on their frequency of use in newspapers.

The entries all have a stroke by stroke order diagram to help you learn to write it. The pronunciation entries are in romaji not kana. Meanings are in English. With each kanji there are several compounds with the kanji entry in different positions in the compound not just as the first character.

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These are small hand held devices. They are either purpose built as dictionaries or you can run a program on a personal organiser such as a Palm Pilot. They are lighter and more compact to carry than a book and much faster to lookup usually.
My recommendation is if you are completely comfortable with kana and have maybe 100 to 200 kanji or so you will find a WordTank useful. Otherwise I think PADict on a Palm PDA is much easier for English speakers and beginners.

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Purpose built dictionaries.

These are made and sold in Japan and are for a native Japanese market. That said the ones aimed at Japanese learning English are useful to students of Japanese. However be warned they can be difficult to use and are probably best for intermediate to advanced users. I found my G55 a bit frustrating to use at first. Also you might find them difficult to buy outside Japan. Amazon.jp has them but won’t deliver outside Japan. The companies that will seem to charge quite a bit extra to do this. Find a Japanese friend or have a go finding one in Denki Town when you visit Japan. I usually don’t find it to be an issue with electronics but any warranty you get will only be valid in Japan.

This site has goodadvice and comparisons of various electronic dictionaries.

Canon WordTank G55

see separate entry

Palm Pilots

An easier choice for the beginner and those without access to Japan is to use a PDA. These are not as popular as they once were so it might be harder to find one brand new but you should be able to get one second hand at CeX or on eBay for less than ￡50. I recommend Sony Clies because they have a high resolution screen and are more compact than other makes. Unfortunately Sony has discontinued them. The TJ35 is a good model. The UX50 has a keyboard which makes input easier and I’ve seen them for ￡150. However once you get used to it pen based input can be fast.

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PAdict

PAdict is the dictionary of choice to run on a Palm system. It’s very useful; a full dictionary that will fit in your pocket. It has a small memory footprint for such a large database, 19907 entries version running in about 2MB or 49000 in 6MB, and version 0.9 now allows you to install the full EDICT of 109329 in 12MB. If English isn’t your first language there are also French-Japanese and German-Japanese dictionaries. It’s really fast at searching and has a variety of input options, English, romaji (converts to kana), kana (using a keypad), by radical and interestingly using kanji writing recognition but your writing and stroke order has to be good. English and romaji are probably the fastest ways to input. kana input needs to be tapped out on a chart which isn’t very fast and getting ” or °is fiddly. It uses a high res font which looks stunning on a 320×320 screen. Kanji input is reasonably good. There are animated kanji stroke order diagrams which makes the dictionary even more useful. It also has a built in multi choice quiz to build vocabulary and you can set up custom lists to store searches and build up vocab lists. And it’s all free.

The Drawbacks. The way JEdict is formatted means that you can get multiple entries with the same English definitions but different kanji. And there are no clues as to which one is correct. You can’t do wildcard searches. Also it indexes on the character order in a word which means you can’t look up kanji compounds very well unless the kanji appears as the first character. The results are limited to 50 and I’m not sure how they are ranked. This means that sometimes the definition you need doesn’t appear in the results even though it is in the dictionary. There are no usage notes.

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Nintendo DS

An unlikely place for a dictionary.
If you already own a Nintendo DS, this dictionary is definitely worth a look. It only costs around 5000円, although it can only be bought in Japan.

I was using this recently in Japan. The plus side is good written input; much easier than a keyboard and more useful with unknown kanji. So Japanese to English is fine. English to Japanese is a slight problem. The results are in kanji. This is ok to show to a Japanese person but difficult if you want to know how to read the kanji so you can speak the word. There isn’t a jump function so you have to input and look up the unknown kanji.

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If you work on a computer it is much more convenient to have your dictionary running on the computer than use a handheld device or a paper dictionary. Not least because you can cut and paste between the dictionary and whatever application you are using. The main choice you have is between a stand alone application where the database is on your computer or an internet application where you have to be connected to the Web to use it. Unless you buy a commercial package all these dictionaries will use the same data which is the EDICT at Monash University.

EDICT
I like EDICT and think it’s a great project and resource but it has it’s limitations. Typically an entry will be 1 line. A dictionary may have a paragraph or a page per entry and will usually have some sort of usage notes. There is an examples database available at EDICT which can help with usage to an extent. A commercial dictionary, paper or electronic, will have had a more comprehensive editing by lexicographers.
A big problem I have with EDICT is indiscriminate entries for kanji with the same reading. Take おりる　for instance. You’ll get two listings but the kanji are not interchangeable.

下りる [おりる] (v1,vi) to alight (e.g., from bus), to get off, to descend (e.g., a mountain).
降りる [おりる] (v1,vi) to alight (e.g., from bus), to get off, to descend (e.g., a mountain).
下りる should be: descend a mountain or staircase. 降りる should be: alight, get off. It happens enough that I noticed. It is more a J to E resource than E to J.
JMDict is meant to address these issues as it has extended the original specifications but as yet the only difference is that the two entries are now merged and have French and Russian entries as well.

I use a Mac so I don’t know standalone dictionaries for Windows. You might try Jim Breen’s site for a listing of suitable programs.
And I’ve read good things about jQuicktrans for Windows although it’s no longer under development. The ability to do wildcard searches seems very useful.


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JEDict

JEDict is my new favourite mac-based dictionary reader.
Again it uses data from the EDICT project like WordLookup, but it’s searches are much more powerful and speedy. It doesn’t only search on the first character. It has single kanji searches so you can find the meaning of individual components. It has a built in user dictionary so you can collect word lists. You can search for kanji you don’t know the reading of by using a radical index. It has a built in web browser that allows you to click on a word and get a translation!!! There is also a dictionary of example sentences which can help in using words. I liked JEDict so much I upgraded my OS version to 10.4 in order to use it.
On the down side it isn’t as well designed as Word Lookup and I find it a bit cluttered and hard to read sometimes. However I think this will improve. The changes between 4.0 and 4.0.1 addressed a lot of things I found difficult.
It is shareware at a very reasonable $25. The unregistered version is completely usable but doesn’t allow you extra dictionaries.
Version 4 needs OSX 10.4 but version 3.8 will run on OS8 and above. (version 3 isn’t as full featured however)

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Eijiro

Eijiro is a commercial Japanese <> English dictionary. It is huge. The base file has 1.5 million entries. It’s cheap at 2138円 as a CD/book from Amazon.jp. (It is also available in a more up to date version at the eijiro website. But this route is much more complex for people without very good Japanese. For the moment I can make do without the more recent file.) The drawback is that it’s for Japanese people learning English. Which are similar to the problems encountered when using a Wordtank.

Some features aren’t useful for English speakers such as words being spoken or the ability to have Japanese popups over english words in a text editor. The supplied reader is also only in Japanese. However the base files are just text files so they can be used in any program that might be able to read them. The files are also given in the popular PDIC format and there are Mac and Windows PDIC readers on the CD.

Worst of all there are no furigana.This means that it’ll only search on kanji not their readings and that only kanji are returned in a search. There are no furigana. Essentially you ned to use it in conjunction with another dictionary like EDICT in order to get kanji readings. I tend to look up in EDICT then get expanded information and examples from Eijiro.

Peter Rivard at Japanese Language Tools provides a service to buy a fully loaded Dell Axim X50V PDA pre-installed with Eijiro and other dictionaries for circa 4.5万円 including shipping. This is comparable in cost to stand alone Electronic Dictionaries but is far more versatile, in terms of other things you can do with it and upgrading the dictionaries when new versions become available. He also sells memory cards with dictionaries preloaded to use with your own PDA system or, very usefully, he will mediate getting a password so you can download and use Eijiro direct from the Eijiro site. Be warned that the downloads are .exe files so you’ll probably need a windows system to extract them properly.

On the Mac it is possible to get a shareware version of PDIC Viewer in English (or mosty in English at any rate). You can either pay the $12 shareware fee or use it to figure out the Japanese menu commands etc. in the registered version that comes with Eijiro.

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WordLookup

WordLookup is a bilingual dictionary reader. For Japanese it uses data from the EDICT project co-ordinated by James Breen at the Monash University in Melbourne Australia. WordLookup allows the user to perform searches on the EDICT data. You will need kana to input a Japanese search or to understand the results of an English search. WordLookup can also read other dictionaries such as English-German and English-Chinese, for details see their site.

WordLookup was once free but since version 3 it is now shareware ($15). As always I’d encourage you to support the author. Unfortunately in order to search for anything beyond “A” you have to buy a licence.
The best new feature of 3 is that it now stores searches. Very useful when checking the meaning of individual kanji in compounds.

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The main advantage to an internet dictionary are extra features,such as on Rikai; an always up to date dictionary database; something that is platform independent; and is available where-ever you have a computer with Japanese support connected to the Internet.

It is possible to get on line translations but invariably they are very strange and are only useful to give you a general understanding and feel for a passage. They don’t really help you learn anything. For that you must do some work.

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Rikai.com

I don’t know how they achieve it (some clever perl scripts I think) but this site allows you to access other sites in Japanese through it. When you access a site through Rikai you get little pop-ups giving you translations of the words and kanji. It doesn’t give a natural translation but it is a huge help in trying to understand Japanese web-sites.

I save the pages it generates so I can read them off-line. It is much easier to run Japanese computer based text through Rikai than to look up each word individually so I use it to make reading email easier.

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Denshi Jisho

Denshi Jisho is a well designed site that allows you to search a dictionary online. What more can I say?

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J-Prep

This is a fairly well designed Flash site. Again it uses the EDICT data to provide a dictionary. The sites extra feature is the ability to save lists of words that can be later be acessed like flashcards. This feature however costs $9 per 3 months. My only big problem with this site is it’s choice of colours. Light blue text on a yellow background is very hard to read.
There is also a companion site that probably gives a flavour of what you might get for your $9

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Kiki’s Kanji Dictionary

Kiki’s Kanji Dictionary is an interesting site and gives you lots of compounds for kanji and is good to browse. However I don’t really like it’s interface. It’s not easy to search.

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Photo Vocabulary

Photo Guide Japan has a detailed list of photography related words. Very useful if you are into photography.

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Kanji Networks

This is an entomological dictionary of Chinese characters as used in Japan. Very useful for finding ways to remember the characters by understanding how their meanings were derived and how the elements work.

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The Counting Dictionary

An interesting little page that lists the various counters used for different items. For instance did you know potted plants are counted
一鉢、二鉢、ひとはち、ふたはち。？

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