Looking Up The Vocab
“Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion” – Georg Wilhelm
Now that you have twenty vocab words associated with your chosen passion, it’s time to look them up in Japanese. Thanks to the internet, looking up Japanese has never been easier. For most Japanese dictionary needs, we’ll be using Jisho.org (jisho means dictionary in Japanese, makes sense, right?)
Doing this will do a couple things. First, it will allow us to look up the words we need to look up for your passion list, and second it will give you some practice working with a Japanese online dictionary (an awesome skill to have if you’re studying Japanese).
Before we get started, though, there’s a couple of things to know.
1. Common Words Only: When searching for something, 99% of the time you’ll want to make sure this box is checked, otherwise you’ll be getting hundreds of somewhat related (but totally weird) results.
2. Kana As Romaji (only for a little while, if you have to). Because I’m supporting romaji (yuck) up until the sixth chapter, I’ll tell you about this. You can check this box and all the kana / hiragana will show up as romaji. I would prefer if you didn’t check this box, though, if you can (and, in theory, you should be able to if you followed along through all the lessons before this one).
3. Multiple Common Words: When you’re searching, there may be multiple common words that show up. It’s no different in English – we have multiple words for the same things a lot of the time. The problem right now, though, is that you don’t know which common word is the best common word. To fix that, I’m going to show you a little trick.
If there are multiple common words, and you can’t tell which one is better, try copy and pasting the (Japanese/kanji) version of the word into Google. Hit search, and look for the number of results. In general, the higher number of results, the more likely your word is a really common word. Compare multiple words this way, and you’ll be able to tell (for the most part) which is the best word to use.
Another way to figure out which words are the best is to search for the word (just like we just did) and then view the images tab in Google. Depending on the type of word, images can literally show you which word is best for you.
Use these tricks, and you’ll surely be able to find the right words for your passion list.