Postby NickT » April 14th, 2007 1:45 pm
EricW: That PDF looks the same as the paper copy of the manual that came with the dictionary - Presumably you can just scribble on that?
Well, I have had the dictionary for a few weeks now. Here are some more things I have noticed about it.
The kanji recognition is really very good. Sometimes you have to experiment with stroke order though, if the dictionary refuses to recognize your kanji after 2-3 attempts, try drawing the radicals in a different order, or changing up the order within a radical. This is actually helping me to eliminate some of my bad habits in terms of stroke order.
Now that I have got used to the 100% Japanese menus, they are pretty easy to use. I don't find the lack of English menus a problem at all. I was able to use the kanji recognition to translate most of the menus that I couldn't figure out for myself. The more kanji you know the easier you will find it though. I'm guessing that if you knew less than, say, 300 kanji, you would find this dictionary pretty hard to use. If you know more than 300 you should be able to figure it out. If you know more than 700, it will be a breeze. For reference I know about 500 kanji, and it took me a few weeks to get to grips with it.
I showed the Japanese manual to a Japanese friend of mine, and she said that the SD card function allowed you to purchase SD cards with extra dictionaries. So, for example, if I decided I wanted to learn Chinese in the future, I might be able to buy all the English/Chinese dictionaries on an SD card, and use my current dictionary instead of buying a new one. Presumably the USB function of the dictionary will allow for a similar functionality, perhaps being able to download new dictionaries or updated firmware for the dictionary in the future.
One thing that has disappointed me about the dictionary is the kanji searching capabilities. It is very easy to find almost any kanji you see, but the problem is, what to do with it? The kanjigen only gives info about the kanji in Japanese. So, even once you have found the kanji you have no idea what it means. Then, you can only search for that kanji in the initial position of a word. This means you can only actually find a fraction of all the words that use that kanji. Am I missing something here?
Another feature my Japanese friend pointed out to me is that apparently, you can download e-Books in Japanese and read them on the screen. If you get stuck, you can use the inbuilt dictionaries to look up any of the words.
There are a lot of additional features, for example an encyclopedia, Japanese and world history, interesting trivia, even a copy of the Japanese constitution. These are all in Japanese though and aimed at Japanese people. Some of it is kinda interesting though. The trivia sections in particular and not overly difficult to read, and provides useful practice. For example, I learnt that the word Yakult comes from the Esperanto word for Yoghurt. There is also a section on things you can say in Japanese to impress your girlfriend. My girlfriend is not Japanese though, so I doubt she would be impressed.
Anyway, if anyone figures out how to use the more advanced features of the dictionary, I would be interested to hear about it. Also if anyone wants me to explain in English how to use any of the menus or features etc I will give it a shot.
Plus it seems like it would have a ton of good examples sentences. I currently have a very basic, bottom-of-the-barrel electronic dictionary from Sharp (one I bought for １万円 at a Midori Denki near 大阪 a few years ago) and lot of times the definitions are a bit unclear since it doesn't give that many examples of usage. And I can't really use it to look up kanji either.
I know you order that one, you don't need to tell us which one ok! 