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Comment by tasogare | Hacker News Reader

Did you start it before JEDict from Breen started existing? It's great for English language for other Japanese-* pairs are poorly endowed. There is also focused work on neologisms that could be done with a few people and could really improve existing free solutions.

I'm personally using the route of digitizing an existing dictionary, albeit manually because that can't be automated in this case.

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JEDict already existed, but it was just a glossary, i.e., Japanese words with English equivalents. But there aren’t many one-to-one correspondences in meaning between Japanese and English words, and such glossaries, while useful, can also be frustrating and misleading to users. My idea for jeKai was to create a dictionary with explanatory definitions, like those that appear in monolingual dictionaries. That turned out to be much more work than we were ready to do, though.

A paper I wrote nine years ago on related issues is here, in case you are interested:

“Kokugo Dictionaries as Tools for Learners: Problems and Potential”

https://researchmap.jp/multidatabases/multidatabase_contents...

Well source language word paired with one or more translations is the minimal structure for a dictionary and some printed dictionaries are indeed like this.

I browsed some entries of your dictionary and indeed their are (sometimes quite elaborate) explanations. I could easily why it ran out of steam, especially even a basic compiling is a daunting task. Also contributors are fews. On the Jibiki.fr (Japanese-French) project, most of the corrections are made by two members. They're starting from an existing dictionary and it still took years to just check the headwords.

Thanks very much for the paper. I'll read it. I actually already had one of your paper on my machine (Asialex 2011 proceedings) but haven't read it yet.

Thank you. I tried to e-mail you at the address on your profile page to suggest that we continue this discussion privately, but Gmail replied with “Your message wasn't delivered to [that address] because the address couldn't be found, or is unable to receive mail.” If you would like to chat about these issues further, please e-mail me at the address on my paper or at my personal website.

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