This Word is Rare

So I’ve already written about how I’m using the Android app Aedict as my main Japanese dictionary. It’s really handy, acts as a simple translator, but, it has one feature I can’t understand. It (like every Japanese-English dictionary I’ve seen) uses Jim Breen’s dictionary data as the source of all the words. And, it gives a “rarity” for each word I have looked up on it. I questioned some of the rarities before, but today I really had to check what was going on. I was typing out a reply on HelloTalk to someone, and I wanted to check that I was spelling こちらこそ correctly (no doubled vowel sounds anywhere),… Read More

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Android Japanese-English Dictionaries: Akebi

(Sorry for the late post. Things got piled up.) The other dictionary I am using is Akebi. It is currently in beta. It offers simple word lookup, recognizing kanji from handwriting, and word lists, which are the same as notebooks in Aedict. The interesting thing is the more complex search. If you enter a set of kanji, you get a tab at the top displayed for each kanji. For example, if I type in 今回, I get two tabs, one for the first kanji [今], and one for the second [回]. Then, at the bottom, I get the full word, and the definition “now, this time”. So, this dictionary can’t… Read More

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Android Japanese-English Dictionaries: Aedict

I thought I’d devote a couple of posts to Android Japanese-English dictionaries, since they are so important to have. Right now, I’ve got two main ones I’m using. I’m going to talk about Aedict in this post. Aedict has a lot of features I like. Let me go through the main ones: Wildcard searches. You can add a ? before or after a kanji character, and get a list of all words with that character in that order, i.e. 先? and ?先 are two different searches. Notepad. You can save words to a notepad, you can have multiple notepads with different categories (verbs, nouns, い adjectives, な adjectives…), you can… Read More

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