Good Japanese Dictionary?

[JesterDev]

I have some on my ipod touch, and I have another one which I cannot remember the name of (it's in my jeep). But there are always words that I cannot find in any of them. Such as words I hear on Drama's, and animes, and even on TV.

I normally type in the Kana in order to find them on my ipod, then if that fails try my hands at the book I have, but often times I have no luck.

Are there any decent dictionaries out there that might be useful?

[dark_angel29977]

www.jisho.org is pretty good. I use it all the time. As for a paper dictionary, I don't know of any super awesome ones off the top of my head.

Are you sure it's specific, discrete words that you can't catch, or weird verb conjugations (which can't be looked up in a normal dictionary)? I don't know your level of Japanese so I'm wondering if that may be it. Anime tends to have a slew of unfamiliar casual conjugations that are tough to manage

[Javizy]

Do you have any examples of the words you can't find? I must look up over 1000 words a month, but aside from the occasional 擬態／音語 I don't have trouble finding any. I use the dictionary called Japanese on my iPod, but it's based on the standard JDIC dictionary that most E-J dictionaries use, so your one probably does to. If you're using iEijiro, you need to input the Japanese the way they have, which means using the correct kanji and kana.

Like dark_angel said, you could be looking up conjugated forms, dialects, phrases (particles get dropped in speech), or having other problems. For instance, you won't find much if you try looking up きいとく or 行きやがる, こうた, わからへん, etc. This is a problem I had when I first started reading manga.

[iaai]

I personally recommend using Kodansha's 'Furigana Japanese Dictionary'. It is a very easy-to-use paper dictionary, because as the name implies, it uses furigana throughout. It also has lots of useful sample sentences for most words (some are casual, most are polite) and it also gives brief grammatical explanations for words such as ばかり,ため,ようand tons of others. It doesn't have every word out there, but has the most common. If I can't find a word in there, I use jisho.org or Kotoba! on my iPod Touch.

[JesterDev]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I will have to check them out. Here is an example of a word that I cannot find: まよいぼし - cannot even convert it to Kanji using the programs I have. From what I can gather from the Anime it's a lost, or wandering star. Jisho could not find the word either.

Another one: じいさま - Old man?

I've been using JWPce to convert the kana to Kanji, but for most of these obscure words, it can't do it.

I am not very advanced with learning Japanese. I know all the Kana, and can read them almost fluently and I can pick up on some words quite easily when I hear them. I know about 20 or so Kanji - just started learning them.

But it is these obscure words that throw me off. I am starting to learn particles, and grammar, so as stated that should help.

[jkerianjapanesepod5596]

迷い星 is likely, given your meaning Separating the two words is needed for most dictionaries.

じい様 is including the honorific "sama" at the end of the word you should be able to easily find. "jii" comes up pretty easily in all the dictionaries I tried, as well as the slightly more common "jiisan". It literally means "grandfather", but like other relationship honorifics(oneesan, oniisan), is used generically for a person who is not related to the speaker, but who is approximately the right age for the term.

In both cases, it seems like a bit more grammar study will help to sort these out.

[dark_angel29977]

If you use the Japanese IME from microsoft to type things in, it should convert stuff to Kanji pretty easily. I typed まよいぼし　in and got 迷い星 as the conversion immediately. In that case, it happens to be two different words. One is an adj describing the second. I think it roughly translates as "hesitant/indecisive star." 迷い is the adj and 星the noun modified Most dictionaries require you to parse the sentence into separate words to find anything so you'd have to separate that out and define each part.

じいさまwas well explained by the above poster. It's simply that you've got to recognize "さま" as a suffix and technically separate from "じい"