Look up definitions of words you already know.

You heard me.

LOOK

UP

WORDS

YOU

ALREADY

KNOW

In Japanese, that would be super, duper, uber, simple, kantan, remedial words. I refer to:

• 此処(here)
• 食べる(eat)
• 飲む(drink)
• 男(man)
• 女(woman)
• 行く(to go)
• 来る(to come)
• 大きい(big)
• 小さい(small)
• お前(you)
• の(“of”)
• ママ(Mama)
• は ([topic marker])
• 氈鹿(goat antelope) — what, you didn’t know this one?
• だ(is)
• よ([emphasis marker])
• ええっ？(huh?)
• 何？(what?)
• 殺す(kill)
• ぞ([emphasis marker])
• この(this)
• 野郎(rascal)

I think you get the message. So, all you cats worrying about “goin’ monolingual”, start with words you already know. No chance of misunderstanding there, right? Right. Good. End transmission.

• [internet] 國語辭典簡編本 (The Abridged Mandarin Dictionary, designed for children, it has pictures and you can even get the definition text read out to you. Sweet).
• [internet] 國語辭典 (the Mandarin Dictionary, the big version of the above, both are made by Taiwan’s Ministry of Education)
• [electronic] 現代漢語辭典 (Modern Mandarin Dictionary on my Canon Wordtank V-90; this is a PRC dic)
• [paper] 國語小辭典 (a children’s paper dictionary I bought online from Taiwan). IMHO, paper dictionaries are no good for real sentence-mining and lookups, but they are fun to browse.

So, most of what I have are comic books and Disney/Pixar DVDs in Chinese. I also have Chinese-dubbed Powerpuff Girls, because I love that show; the dialogue is hilarious; the animation is top-notch minimalist and…and yeah. It’s a good show. McCracken and Tartakovsky are unsung geniuses; as far as I am aware, their work was the only thing in American TV animation worth watching during that dark age after both Batman: The Animated Series and Gargoyles had ended. Am I comparing Dexter’s Lab to Gargoyles? Yes.

I’ve already watched 玩具總動員/Toy Story about 10 times, I looped that “I’ll make a man of you/男子漢” song in 花木蘭/Mulan until people (Momoko) started making death threats. This is what I mean about having fun things to read and watch — you can learn a ton of words and sentences and have fun at the same time. I’ve been singing 男子漢 all night — I’ve even made up a version called 「孫小龍」 (my cat’s Chinese name…long story, but he was “hunting” and doing other manly (that’s sexist…lionesses hunt all the time…anyway) things, so it seemed more than appropriate).

Yes, that’s another personal development book at the bottom. I feel kind of embarassed buying stuff like that, like “what’s the matter, Khatzumoto — you need wittle help becwoming a bwetter pwerson?”, but…whatever, I guess. Actually, if you ever do get the chance, Brian Tracy’s Eat That Frog is a really good time management book. Short, sweet, no BS, straight to the point. Speaking of BS, there are of course a lot of shady people in the PD industry. I think part of the problem is that many people treat personal development with a fervor that is essentially religious; they’re looking for a religion — they’re looking for something that is good and true all the time and that they need only believe and obey in order to be happy. The problem is that the PD industry is very much a human endeavour, so it does require you to have your brain turned on and your BS radar working at full capacity. On the other hand, I think it’s immature — literally — a sign of underdeveloped thinking to say that “the PD industry has problems, therefore we should ignore it completely” — very much a baby-and-bathwater way of doing it. Some of its good, a lot of it sucks, and you have to pick out the good — the good authors, the good parts of the good authors’ books, and stuff. I don’t know…That particular PD book in the picture, by the way, has some people in it who are full of crap, so I wouldn’t recommend to you unless you’re happy separating wheat from chaff.

Also, in the past week, I realized that my ability to create a foreign-language environment is…too powerful. I was finding myself going for long stretches of time without ever using Japanese; this had no short-term effect, but I worry that it could stunt my Japanese growth in the long term. I don’t “need” to know any more Japanese than I do now — I can function as an adult — but why not go beyond that, I think? Why not keep building a massive vocabulary? So, in the interests of maintaining and expanding use of Japanese, I am scaling back my use of monolingual Chinese dictionaries — I am going back to using the laddering method, with Japanese as a base language for Chinese. Interestingly enough, though, my sojourn with Chinese monolingual dictionaries has given me a lot of confidence in using them, and sometimes when I’m unhappy with a certain Japanese definition, I refer to a C-C dictionary.

At first I was scared sheetless stiff at the thought of using a monolingual Japanese dictionary. My husband encouraged me from early on, but I was very skeptical. I didn’t think I knew enough vocabulary. I couldn’t even understand Japanese children’s books written for 2-year-olds without some serious effort…still can’t; [Note: I attempted to soothe her ego with a reminder that these books are either designed to be read to children by parents, or are written in all-hiragana -- which is really hard for even Japanese adults to read. Certainly I find them quite unwieldy -- Khatzumoto]. So the idea of looking up a word I didn’t know…only to encounter 10 times as many words I didn’t know in the definition…and then looking all those up only to encounter even MORE new words, and so on, seemed like opening a Pandora’s box of horrors. My husband tried to console me by telling me it would all come around in a circle to the starting point…there were only a limited number of words that could be used to describe a concept. But that just made me feel even more uneasy. If I didn’t understand any of the words in that circle anyway, how was that going to help?

At first I dipped my toe into the swimming pool with the Sanseido dictionary—a ‘concise’ Japanese-Japanese dictionary for adults. But I still found the definitions to be a bit wordy and confusing and difficult to navigate, since the search box works best with hiragana and I didn’t know the furigana on all the kanji. I went back to the trusty kanji-reading “Translate Words” function in WWWJDIC and contented myself with its wealth of English definitions. Once in a while I would salve over my guilt by cutting and pasting the simplest Japanese definitions from Sanseido (that I never fully understood and never cross-referenced). I’d stick them in the bottom of my SRS answers, telling myself that someday I’d know more words and those cryptic definitions would make sense…

But I have finally seen the light. My husband helped me select a Japanese-Japanese dictionary from the bookstore that is made for Japanese children: チャレンジ小学国語辞典（チャレンジ-しょう-がく-こく-ご-じ-てん）/The Challenge Elementary School Japanese Dictionary, published by Benesse, and edited by 湊吉正（みなと　よしまさ）, fourth edition. It has furigana on EVERY kanji in the book (woo hoo!), so I’m never lost in how to pronounce what I am reading or in looking up new words I encounter. The definitions are concise and clear, and there are helpful example sentences for each entry. I’ve been surprised at how much I already do understand, despite my limited knowledge of vocabulary. Sometimes I check my understanding with a Japanese-English dictionary, but usually I’ve already guessed right from the context—the multiple synonyms and the way the word is used in the example sentence(s). [Note: By having simple definitions and furigana on every kanji, this dictionary makes up for not being electronic -- Khatzumoto].

And best of all, I no longer see the cross-referencing process as a burden…it’s a bonus—a way to easily and quickly mine new sentences for my SRS. Whenever I look up a word in my Japanese-Japanese dictionary, I enter the example sentence. Then I look up a word that’s new in that sentence (or from the definition) and use the example sentence(s) from THAT, and so on… Life is sweet.

Here is a sample page (click to enlarge):

Feelingswise it’s really liberating. Learning a language through another language is so mentally burdensome. It always seems like you’re doing translation in your head. From what I know of Japanese and English, I can confidently say that running a J-E translation in your head every time you want to say something is being recipe for これは is a disaster of Engrish proportionです . Plus there’s all the time and brain cycles spent (wasted) reading ABOUT your target language instead of actually USING it. After all, I’m not in this game to discuss or analyze Chinese, I’m in this game to become the best durn Chinese user since that other guy. If that analysis is IN Chinese, well and good — otherwise, as Ludacris might say: “move, beach! get out the way” [dang, if my sisters read this blog, they'd have a stern word or two for me...].

As for the number of sentences I do per day, I’m not worrying too much about that. I was initially doing 100 per day, because I wanted to be a trailblazer like Wan Zafran. However, it took too long per sentence, and hate to admit weakness, but I haven’t quite built up the mental strength to go for 100 Chinese-Chinese sentences in one day (Chinese-Japanese and Japanese-Japanese would be fine…but even though the quantity would be higher, I think the quality of doing Chinese-Chinese is greater — ultimately, the lack of a crutch (Japanese) is making me use my own “muscles” more). Earlier in my life, this would have led to me feeling bad or even giving up altogether, but that would be silly.

To me, all of that only underscores why we need to be using monolingual dictionaries. If you can’t understand it, it means you need to work on it. Now, sometimes the best strategy with something you don’t understand is to skip over it and pick some other low-hanging fruit. But this is not entirely the case with monolingual dictionaries (monodics? can I call them that?　monodics?).

If it still hurts your soul, all that extra dictionary time you are spending, just think of it this way: at its core, a monodic is nothing but a book — a book written in the language you are wanting to learn. Since, presumably, you are wanting to learn that language, being able to read books in that language is also something you want (need) to do — the fact that a book is in entirely in Japanese is reason enough for a Japanese learner to own it and be reading it. And guess what else? This book, the monodic, is not like other books: it’s self-referential. A self-referential book that contains many if not most of the secrets of the language you want to learn. Sounds like magic — indeed, in a very real sense, it is.

Dude, you’re getting a monodic.

Of course, Chinese and Japanese are different, but they are similar enough (writing system that is logographic and emphasizes meaning over pronunciation) that methods for learning one can easily port to the other.

Anyway, on to the main topic. So, one of the things that I recommend as part of the method described on this site (and, indeed, on AntiMoon), is to GO MONOLINGUAL. Whatever language you are studying, start as soon as possible to study it only in itself. Only use Japanese to learn Japanese, etc.

But how does one go about making this transition? Well, you could just go cold turkey (I more or less did; the transition was very, very short). But I know at least one person who’s having trouble with that. Since I’m in the process of making a more gradual transition from Chinese-Japanese to Chinese-Chinese, this seems like a good opportunity to explain how to do it.

In the rest of this post (and in future posts), I may make more references to language-learning in general, rather than to a specific language. I feel kind of unqualified doing this, because although I have either been a native speaker of, or taken classes in about 7 languages, I’ve forgotten most of them through disuse and/or violently boring teaching methods. But since Japanese has an unfair reputation for difficulty, we can just pretend I have the right to speak about other languages as well, right? It can be our little secret.

Step 1. Accept that it will be a bit slower to begin with. This goes without saying. Due to lack of practice, you’re not yet as good at the target language as you are at the base language. That’s fine. The reduced speed will be more than made up for by the self-multiplying benefits of studying a language using itself. Looking up definitions of parts of definitions using a monolingual dictionary will deepen your qualitative and quantitative connection with a language no end. Your study of a given language is now using that language — this is a great thing; it means that every moment of your time is now a moment where you are thinking, using and therefore getting better at, the language in question.

Step 2. Just try it. Dip your toe in. Start mixing your lookups in the bilingual dictionary with lookups in the monolingual dictionary. Put monolingual and bilingual definitions side-by-side in SRS entries.

Step 3. Keep using sentences that have a translation in the base language (i.e. sentences from the bilingual dictionary, etc.), but only use definitions from the monolingual dictionary. If you are really stuck and don’t know what a word in the actual definition means, feel free to look that up in the bilingual dictionary — but look go find and use the relevant monolingual entry right afterwards.

Step 4. Out of the baby pool, into the fire (huh?). Go strictly monolingual. All lookups to be made only in a monolingual dictionary. You do not speak English any more. You do not know English.

Regardless of the step you are at, until you feel comfortable doing otherwise, I would include furigana/bopomofo/pinyin for the full text of monolingual definitions (i.e. those in the “answer” section of your SRS) — after all, it’s not like you are trying to test your knowledge of the answer section, so give yourself all the help you need.

If you don’t already have a monolingual dictionary, get one. A lot of people have the idea that they should save things like this for when they “get good”. Bad move. Don’t wait to get good to get materials in your target language. Remember, you get good at your target language by doing things in your target language. Ultimately, native fluency is both the cause and effect of acting native and experiencing things made by and for native users.

Again, if you can, I would just bite the bullet and go monolingual in one shot. As long as you keep using a different language B (base) to study language T (target), your thoughts of language T will be polluted by language B. Your conception of the meaning and usage of words in language T will suffer from language B-style thinking. Perhaps this is fine for a while if you’re laddering languages (in which case your motives lie as much in continuing to improve language B as in language T), but even then, only for a while.

昔から「言葉は最大の武器だ」という。本当にそうであれば、辞書を引くのは正に銃の引き金を引くのと同じことで、訓練をしなければならない。そこで言語学習者にとって辞書の役割は、ただ単語を教える事を超えて、取扱説明書の様に用例や「下に打ち消しの語を伴う」の様な注意などを通してその単語の用法を教える事も不可欠である。用例・注意などを満載した辞書は、まるで親友同然の宝物。

だから辞書は、「絶対使うな」なんて言葉に耳を貸さず、喜んで正しく使おう。何故かと言うと、永遠に頼る物ではなく寧ろ我々を解放する道具になる。辞書を座右の友にし頻繁に引き、引いた語の用例の意味を覚えよう。その用例をSRSに入力し復習しよう。すると、辞書に頼っていたからこそ徐々に頼る（引く）必要が減って行く。確かに時間が掛かるが、この手法の経験者として「価値はある」と確証する。辞書が無いと生きていけなかった私が、今では初めて見る単語の意味を調べず文脈から正確に推定できる様になったし、辞書を引く理由は殆どが好奇心からである。「絶対使うな」とのアドバイスに従っていれば恐らくここまで成長しなかっただろう。

Click here for English version

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The problem isn’t whether you use a dictionary, but how. If you use it for looking up words one by one as you attempt to write a document, then you’re going to be in a world of hurt. You’ll end up with things like “Apparence was given me that he had proceeded too great a distance”, rather than “It was obvious that he’d gone too far”…or worse.

As far as the learner of a language is concerned, the purpose of a dictionary is not merely to throw a word or two back in your face (that’s like giving a baby a firearm; it may end well, but more likely than not, there will be injuries), but to give you some direction as to how to use that word. The way it does that is through usage examples and any other guidance (like “this word is usually used in a negative form or followed by a negated verb”; “this word usually carries a bad connotation”, and so on). In the absence of a native speaker with oodles of time on her hands and an encyplopedic knowledge of her language, a good dictionary will take you far, far, far.

So, use a dictionary. But use it properly; use it to make progress; use it as a ladder and not a crutch — learn the example sentences in it (memorizing the meaning of the sentence and of the words it contains, such that when presented with the same example sentece again, you can correctly determine its meaning and pronunciation); that is, use the dictionary itself to break your dependence on dictionaries. After all, the more of the dictionary is in your head, the less you’ll need to refer to the dictionary. What will eventually happen is that you’ll be able to figure out the working of words just like you do in your native language — from context. In the past few months preceding this writing, I have finally reached this level in Japanese. Now I mostly look up new words out of curiosity rather than need; it’s become obvious to me what a new word means in a sentence, even without kanji. But it took a lot of dictionary-use to get to this stage. My dictionary became an extension of my skin, just as my headphones were of my ears. Now I leave the old Wordtank at home.

My 2 yen on that debate.

日本語版はここをクリック。

If you’re just getting started using Japanese-Japanese dictionaries, I recommend this dictionary because the entries (in the free version) are short, clear and concise. When you’re just starting out, a long Japanese explanation may just scare or confuse you. With this dictionary, that shouldn’t be the case.

1. Navigate to the Sanseido website. At this writing, the page should look something like this.

2. Under 【辞書を引く】(じ・しょ　を　ひ・く look up in the dictionary) is a textbox. This is the searchbox. There, type in what you are wanting to search. For this example, we type in the word “ここ” as searchtext. Note: Generally, your searchtext should either be all kanji or all kana. Never mix; the dictionary will likely be unable to handle it (i.e. it won’t return you any matches).

• By default, the dictionary is set to “前方一致” (ぜん・ぽう・いっ・ち）, which means it will find all entries that start with what you search. This is good enough for most purposes.
• 完全一致(かん・ぜん・いっ・ち) will give you only exact matches.
• 後方一致（こう・ほう・いっ・ち） will find matching entries that end with what you search.
• 全文検索（ぜん・ぶん・けん・さく） won’t only match the headwords of the entries, but will also search their definition text.
• 成句検索（せい・く・けん・さく） searches example sentences within definitions (I think)

3. OK, now that you’ve entered the text you want to search (“ここ”), click on the 【検索】 (けん・さく、search) button — the searchbutton.

4. Sweet. You’ve clicked the searchbutton. Now, a new window should open; it will contain your results in a column to the left of the screen. Select the best match. The right side of the screen will have the definition and example sentences of the first or currently selected match.

5. You’ll notice that the Sanseido dictionary searches multiple dictionaries by default. It’s fine to have English down at the bottom of the screen for a while, but it is a crutch and you do want to get over it. There’s a simple way to disable English. Just follow the images below. In each case, you:
i. Click on the drop-down boxes on the second row at the top of the screen, to the right of 【辞書を選択】(じ・しょ　を　せん・たく, select dictionaries), and
ii. Select 【選択しない】（せん・たく　しない, do not select)
Part 1: Disable English-Japanese

Part 2: Disable Japanese-English

Presto. You are now officially “sorted, mate”. English is out of your life. You’ll find there’s more space for your Japanese matches.

6. Oh, before we forget. From now on, you don’t need to go back to the main page to search. You can just use the searchbox and searchbutton on the results page.

Anyway, I hope that this has helped you and that I’m not explaining something that’s painfully obvious and didn’t require explanation. Either way, please let me know by way of comment (bottom of the screen). Thanks!

I’m reminded of that story (I don’t remember the details so I’m going to make them up) about a wealthy French army officer, a colonel or something. This colonel asked his gardener to plant a special type of tree that takes decades to bloom. The gardener was hesitant, saying: “Dude! WTF? What’s the point? It’ll take like 20 years to grow!”

To which the colonel replied: “In that case, there’s no time to lose — you’d better get started right away”.

With that in mind, almost everything on this site is done in the spirit of “best answer at the time”, because good enough beats perfect. At the time, I told you about the best (online) dictionaries that I knew of. But the situation has changed a bit. With that, I present to you some new dictionaries that Google has given, that can help you in your noble quest for example sentences and Japanese fluency. So, in order of current preference:

InfoSeek Dictionary
Based on the same paper dictionary as Goo, so no difference in terms of raw content, but a much nicer interface; it even stores a dated history of your searches. This is a great help, because you’ll be doing lots of jumping from definition to definition within the dictionary, and so now you have a much more convenient jumping method than simply using your web browser’s “back” button. Definitely a keeper

Sanseido Web Dictionary
Official site of the actual Sanseido dictionary on which many (most?) other online Japanese dictionaries are currently based. When you first run a search on the site, it opens itself a new window (“hey, don’t mind if I do!”), which I personally find a bit presumptuous. On the plus side, it searches and displays full entries from the respective Japanese-Japanese, English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries *simultaneously*. So, if you’re just taking your first baby steps towards Japanese-only lookup, then this is valuable set of training wheels. Just be sure to wean yourself off them.

Note: The romanization is “Sanseido”, but it actually should be “Sanseidoh” or “Sanseidou” (三省堂＝さん・せい・どう）; it’s a long “o” sound. This isn’t just a matter of being pedantic; with incorrect pronunciation, you might have difficulty entering the word into a computer. This is just another one of the many reasons why romaji sucks.

Weblio Dictionary
Weblio is another Sanseido clone, so nothing special there. What’s different about it is this: it not only searches your word, but it also links you to a list of articles containing that word (so, usage examples) in the Yomiuri Online. You probably already know this, but this is the online version of the highest-circulation newspaper in the world; it’s popular, so it must be good, right ? Not only that, but you also get links to books on Amazon.jp containing that word in their titles. Very cool. Unfortunately, the newspaper articles can be slightly, hmm, what’s the word I’m looking for…boring. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is a very cool search, and a great example of adding a lot of value for very little actual work.

Goo Dictionary
Psssh. Goo? That’s soooo two weeks go. Here it is for reference, though.

ALC Onomatopeia Dictionary
A specialist dictionary with a narrow focus on onomatopeia. Onomatopeic words are, of course, those that sound like the thing they’re describing. It happens a lot in English. Bombs go boom. Little feet go pitter-patter. Mice squeak. Japanese has a ton of words like this, too. They’re really fun and they get used a lot, even in formal situations. It won’t be your only online dictionary, but it will be useful.

CAUTION: The ALC website also features a Japanese/English/Japanese dictionary called Eijirou. It looks good, and it will seem to have everything you want in terms of usage examples. Unfortunately, these examples have not been edited and have no usage cautions on them even though they should; That makes them dangerous for most people like you and me, who do not yet know all the more subtle nuances of a given word in Japanese; our “this doesn’t sound right” detectors are still weak. Besides, do you know all that poorly worded English you sometimes see written by Japanese speakers? That’s what happens when you use Eijirou. So, stay away from it if you can.

That’s it. My personal pick right now is the InfoSeek one. Have I missed any? Are there any you find interesting or useful? Please feel free to comment on it.