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JED and Aedict (and Midori for that matter) both use EDICT, which is not a very good dictionary. I rarely use them anymore, aside from JED for its ability to export words to Anki. It’s okay for beginners or rikaichan, but as shown in this forum previously some of the “definitions” can be dubious and I find it lacking in depth.
I don’t know a whole lot about Japanese dictionaries, so I hadn’t heard that before. Where on the forums has this been talked about before?
I don’t remember what thread it was in, but someone had trouble understanding a word in a sentence and Edict gave some strange definition that disagreed with all commercial dictionaries I checked, including two J-J monolingual dictionaries.
This one?
http://www.textfugu.com/bb/topic/how-do-i-say-thread/page/8/#post-24912
That could possibly be down to asking my dictionary the wrong question. That said, Kotoba’s example sentences are occasionally a bit off.
It’s not just your dictionary, all Edict based dictionaries have that same definition.
The example sentences those free dictionaries use are all from the Tanaka Corpus, now maintained by Tatoeba. Many of them are not natural Japanese because they are English sentences translated into Japanese, done by students without any kind of proofreading. The original Tanaka website even has a big disclaimer with multiple warnings about how they shouldn’t be trusted too much:
http://www.manythings.org/corpus/warning.html
This is different to the Kenkyusha which has native Japanese sentences translated into English, written and translated by a team of professionals.
Just to add, I submitted a correction for ぱちり and it has been approved and corrected in the main Edict database. Most Edict based dictionary apps wont be using the most up to date database though, so will still have the wrong definition for now.
But at least it’s fixed.
What about WWWJDIC by Jim Breen? How does that stand up against Edict?
Android has an app for WWWJDIC and http://www.jisho.org, which Kouichi recommends, uses WWWJDIC.
Here is the app for it: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.nick.wwwjdic&hl=en
WWWJDIC is Edict. Both are by Jim Breen.
Edict is his J-E dictionary, WWWJDIC is his online interface for searching it.
Just to clarify something I said earlier regarding the Tanaka Corpus, the original sentences weren’t actually translated by students. They were compiled and typed in by students, but taken from various multilingual sources like news articles that had been translated from English to Japanese or textbooks. Once it became part of Tatoeba, it became open to anyone to add sentences to it.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 8 months ago by
Elenkis.
@missingno15 Brilliant! Just the app I have been looking for, lol. :P
I’ve seen it with a female voice too. I wonder how many people got that app and thought it was a real person.
btw, who is the girl in your avatar?
BTW, inspired by Elenkis I wrote a Japanese dictionaries guide on Tofugu, which will hopefully help people tell EDICT apart from Eijiro apart from Kenkyusha
http://www.tofugu.com/guides/japanese-dictionaries-guide/
Let me know what you think!
Great article! Thanks Hashi! $200 isn’t too bad a price. I will probably purchase it once my Japanese is more advanced or when I start Japanese studies at university.
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This reply was modified 12 years, 8 months ago by
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