Japanese dictionary

[Sly]

こんばんは、ｓｌｙです
I have been self-studying japanese for 1 month and 3 weeks, and I want to buy a dictionary but I don't know what to choose.
I would like to be able to lookup for english words and see their translation to japanese (kana and kanji) and lookup for japanese words (kana and kanji) and see their translation to english. And If possible, including a sentence example for each word.
Also besides dictionaries, I would like to know some resource that could show me the conjugation of verbs
For example: "I want to eat", "I am going to eat" for these I know it is: "たべたいです" "たべなす" and a lot more options.
I don't want to buy something that is too expensive and I will be happy if you can help me. おねがいします！
ありがとうございます！

 

[letslearn]

There are many free dictionary apps you can download to your phone or tablet. JED is a good one. I find for good sentence examples one called "Aeidict" has many examples and also has a good kanji search as well.

 

[Sly]

Thank you for your reply, I will give those apps a look.

 

[Angel Valis]

A couple of good online dictionaries are Jisho.org (I think I can share this now that it's in public beta...) and 英語・語学の学習情報サイト「スペースアルク」：アルク. As for conjugations, searching on this forum should net you a few different topics which list out a great number of them.

 

[blutorange]

Just my two cents. If you do a quick search, there are lots of programs and web interfaces offering dictionary lookups out there. Writing such a program doesn't take that much effort, but compiling the actual dictionary data does. Most of these free Japanese-English apps use the freely available wwwjdic project data, WWWJDIC: Word Search , which is basically a list of every possible English meaning/translation for each Japanese entry.

While it does have its merits, there are several shortcomings: lists every possible nuance and meaning which may confuse you; no example sentences illustrating the usage; at best abyssmal for English>Japanese, although the jisho beta does improve upon this quite a bit. In short, now that I have access to other dictionaries, I hardly use it anymore.

For me, commercial dictionaries are still the best, especially with an electronic dictionary (電子辞書, with kanji hand draw recognition) or on my phone in epwing format. The best dictionary, imo, is the 明鏡国語辞典, which, to put it in a nutshell, simply does justice to its name. But it's a Japanese-only dictionary, so it won't be of much use to you, yet.

You can search some commercialJ-E/E-J dics here for free:
国語・英和・和英・類語・中国語辞書検索 - goo辞書 (select 英和 for English-Japanese or 和英 for Jap-Eng)
国語・英和・和英および専門辞書の検索サービス - Yahoo!辞書

The eijiro page linked to above is pretty godd for example sentences with English translations.

Japanese conjugation is pretty easy and straightforward with hardly any exceptions, so I never understood why people would want conjugation tables. You're much better off reading a good grammar guide such as
start [The Nihongoresources Grammar book]
日本語資源 - Nihongoresources.com
Learn Japanese | Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese
If there is anything hard about Japanese conjugation, it's when to use each form, but those tables won't help you with that either. If you really want it, the jisho beta (see post above) can actually do that: Just search for some verb and click "inflections"... (although it doesn't work for the few irregular verbs yet)