Wordtank Questions

[shakma]

I have the Kanji Sonomama on the Nintendo DS, and heard that an actual dictionary is better, so i decided to get a Wordtank v90. Its a pretty sweet unit, for the most part. However, i'm experience some difficulty with it. Mostly with kanji compound, actually.

When i look up stuff in Kanjigen, i can look up the initial meaning of the kanji, and some of them have a few compounds included but not a lot. F.ex, I can look up 電 and 話, and get generally what they mean, but i can't just simply input the phrase 電話 and come up with telephone. In Kanji Sonomama on NDS, it seems to have a lot more compounds, and thus actually seems to make reading a lot easier. I realize it's not going to be complete as a Nelson's Dictionary (Or should it?) but could someone give me a hand, please? Is there just something I'm missing or is this feature just absent from the V90?

Thanks!

 

[Glenn]

For words you should use the dictionary that comes with it, which I'm pretty sure is Kôjien. Kanjigen is way more complete than Nelson's as far as I'm aware: you get all sorts of information on the classification of the character (jôyô or not; number of strokes; radical; Kuten, Unicode, Shift JIS, and JIS codes), readings (including which Chinese dynasty they were borrowed from, original Chinese tone, and current Mandarin reading, and name readings), meanings, character breakdown and etymology, related characters, and difficult readings. That's pretty comprehensive.

Also, look at the compounds given in Kanjigen for 電: 電影, 電撃, 電激, 電光, 電光石火, 電光朝露, 電閃, 電掃, 電鞭, 電滅, 電掣, 電纜. I can't begin to describe how much of a PITA it was for me to input all of those, as most of them don't exist in the ことえり dictionary. The compounds in 漢和辞典 tend to be more for obscure words used in old Chinese texts than everyday words (certainly on this list, anyway), probably because Japanese people already know the everyday words and they have dictionaries for those anyway.

 

[shakma]

So basically, what you're saying is i cant use it for more basic compounds that would be more commonly known? If i were to use it to read manga or something along those lines? Is something like Kanji Sonomama on DS more inline with that purpose?

 

[Glenn]

I'm saying use Kôjien for words and Kanjigen for characters. Kôjien is a dictionary; Kanjigen is a character dictionary.

 

[shakma]

You cant input Kanji into anything, sans the Chinese dictionaries and kanjigen, though. If i knew the pronunciations of the words i encounter, i could do what you're saying. Since i don't, i can't.

 

[Glenn]

That does complicate things. I have a writing pad on mine, so it's no problem inputting kanji into the dicitonary. The only thing I can suggest to you (aside from learning lots of readings so that you can guess more easily) is to utilize the heck out of the jump feature. It's a bit of a pain, but you can look up the first character of a compound in Kanjigen, then highlight it and jump to Kôjien to see a list of words that start with that character, and just look for the one that you want. If you're reading things online I suggest using the dictionaries at goo. You can just copy and paste into it; it's great.

Out of curiosity, 電話 isn't an example of a word you had to look up, is it? I'm just wondering about what your level is. If you're still learning words like 電話, a 漢和辞典 and 国語辞典 may be a bit above your level.

 

[shakma]

I just used 窶彭ﾋ彙 as a example of a common reading i couldnt find in the dictionary. I actually used it as a reference to show my friend how the v90 works, and was surprised such a basic reading wasn't in there. For myself, I'm halfway done with my second year in japanese at university, so i figured a wordtank would have been a good investment.

The thing that was most surprising to me was that Kanji sonomama on Nintendo DS was much more effective for helping me along using manga and more basic written stuff than the Wordtank is, though i do intend to hang on to the wordtank because the actual dictionaries for reference purposes are amazing.

 

[Glenn]

Just reading through 広辞苑 and using the jump feature for words and readings you don't know would probably help you out a lot. Of course, I could just be a freak for liking to read the dictionary....

If you had some manga with furigana you'd probably be better off. If you can find any you like like that I say that's your best bet for getting the readings and being able to look up unknown words. It certainly is nicer than having to guess the readings, and then read through 3 or 4 entries that have the same characters with different readings and try to figure out which one is the correct (or at worst most likely) one.