Postby NickT » May 2nd, 2007 6:53 pm
Geir,
Those are some good questions.
Regarding the plural dictionary, I had forgotten about this. I remember reading about it when I bought the thing, but I haven't noticed it in the month or so I have had the dictionary and been playing around with it, so I did some research.
I found several websites that stated that this function was used to search for the plural forms of words. This, it turns out, is not correct.
The plural dictionaries can be accessed using the key in the top left, next to the ON/OFF key. It is the key labeled 複数アルファベット / 複数ひらがな。 There is also a third plural dictionary, the kanji plural dictionary, that can only be accessed from the main menu. If you go to the right-most tab （便利な機能 - useful functions）then it is the second-bottom option.
As far as I can tell, this function basically allows you to search multiple dictionaries at once. So, if you type say べんり into the hiragana plural dictionary, it will provide matches from the 広辞苑、the progressive dictionary, and even the proverb dictionary and "MyPedia". The same principal applies for the alphabet and kanji versions.
As for 日本人、 you are correct that this doesn't seem to have its own entry on the Progressive dictionary (also my favourite dictionary, easily the most useful for native English speakers). If you go to the 日本 entry, then it lists a large number of compounds starting with 日本、 of which 日本人 is the first.
Incidentally, if you type 日本人 into the kanji plural dictionary, you get three hits. All of them are from the 広辞苑 Japanese to Japanese dictionary, and are defined completely in Japanese.
As for grammar... well, it is a dictionary, after all. I once heard the word grammar defined as "all the things you need to know about a language that can't be found in a dictionary". It had never occurred to me to try and get grammar information from the dictionary, but you are right it would be useful to know what class each verb is at least. Mark that down as one for the "Cons" column.
