Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, and EDICT is pretty weak Japanese dictionary, IMHO. One-word translations lead to misunderstandings. Having gone to school in Japan, I found EDICT useless whereas a random paper dictionary or denshi-jisho would actually help me find the right word.

So anyway, I would not use EDICT as my sole source for "there is no word" or "the correct word is..." If I cared, I would probably read through the Japanese newspaper coverage until I found a word that seemed relevant in both dictionary definition and actual context. If there is no word for the phenomenon or it never happened, then you wouldn't be able to prove anything... but if there is a word and it did occur, then you would have something a little more solid than "I googled for Japanese dictionary and found some words in them."

Really, I always found it pretty useful. I guess this might be because when doing J->E translation I already had context from the source text. Still the WWWJDIC results at least link to ALC (which does give lots of context) or to Japanese Wikipedia entries (which can compare to the English version of the same article)

For arguments sake: http://eow.alc.co.jp/%CE%AC%C3%A5/EUC-JP/ has lots of usage examples of 略奪 in context suggesting it does in fact mean looting.

Thanks for the link! Somehow I'd never come across that site before (I guess because I've got a good densi jisyo. The only times I check out words online is when I want more context; in which case I go to the Japanese Wikipedia).

The question left open, though, is whether that's the word reporters normally would use. It's not clear in the examples whether or not the word is being used hyperbolically. I mean, just because you can say "Muhammad Ali annihilated his opponent" doesn't mean that "annihilate" is a synonym for "defeat".

Do you feel the same way about Jisho (http://jisho.org/)? I generally find it handy.

This looks good, too. I especially like the fact that it tells which words are "Common word"s.

I take issue with calling it "weak". EDICT is useful resource that needs sentence examples.

It certainly is far better than any e-dictionary I could find for French back when I was forced (by law) to attend French class. It definitely helped a lot when I was in college (and, admittedly, situations where I used the wrong word)

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