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), so I entered it into Aedict, and I got this word flagged as Rare.
I might not know a lot of Japanese, but I know こちらこそ is not a rare word.
Well, I thought to myself, maybe he’s pulling this in from Jim Breen’s dictionary data. So I just now went to the WWJDIC site to search it, and guess what? Maybe there’s a rarity rating there somewhere, but I sure as heck couldn’t find it.
The point is moot, since the author of Aedict has ceased working on the app, and is only working on the online version of it, but now I’m definitely not going to trust any rarity ratings I see now.