I recently discovered LingQ (via a video from lingosteve on YouTube), and I use it to study English and Japanese.
For the English lessons I can select dictionaries like the Longman (to get definitions instead of translations), but for the Japanese lessons it seems that a good Japanese-Japanese dictionary is missing in the list of available dictionaries. Would it be possible to add one?
IMO, Weblio (JP-JP) would be a very good choice. Weblio’s definitions and examples come from the 大辞林, an excellent Japanese dictionary.
Here is the URL:
Hope you can add it in the near future (though I know it’s a lot of work).
@dooo, I was thinking the same thing. Higashi writes like a native.
Sometimes it’s funny to me how good people wanna get. An amazing quirk of human motivation.
We have just added Weblio. Thanks for the suggestion. All dictionaries on the site were requested by someone so continue to let us know if you feel there are dictionary resources we could be adding. Especially for language combinations we don’t have a resource for at the moment.
This string searches both in the French and Japanese entries on the site, and shows the results in a plain (white) page, without any pub. If you wish I can add a link to LingQ in this results page, as an exception
One more… I know that LingQ already has a huge list of English-French dictionaries, but TradooIT would be a very good supplementary ressource. Millions of non-machine translations (words and sentences)…
Mark, I made a few searches with TradooIT (from English to French) and there’s a small technical problem. Sentences are translated, but at the top of the page, where words’ translations should be displayed, I get only the English terms. The French column in missing.
@Higashi - Looks like a problem with the way the page is displaying. When horizontal scrolling the content to the right of the fold is not displayed. We’ll see if there is anything that can be done about this.
Mark, I have a suggestion for the popup definitions (translations) that appear automatically when we put the mouse over a word.
For Japanese-English, the translations seem to come from a couple of sources (Google translate and users’ LingQs?)
I don’t know if it’s technically difficult, but WWWJDIC would be a good addition (superior to Google translate). And it’s updated daily with new words.
There is a backdoor access to the WWWJDIC, that displays the search results in a raw (white) page.
@Higashi - That’s an interesting suggestion and something we may look at in the future. Right now, we have to stay focused on doing things that improve functionality for learners of all languages. Is that dictionary not already available as a resource when you Check Dictionary?
@Mark - No, I don’t see it in the ressources. I just thought it would be a great plus for the popup translations. I understand that you have priorities for the whole site, no problem.
@ron - I may be wrong, but I think that jisho.org uses a downloaded edict file (I don’t know if they update it regularly). WWWJDIC’s site updates the edict file daily, and offers eight other languages (though with a limited content). The other advantage, with the backdoor syntax I described above, is that you get the results in a white page, without pub (but unfortunatly you cannot modify your search, for that WWWJDIC’s home page would be OK…).
@dooo I’m surprised to hear that. Maybe that’s because I used the Japanese mirror of WWWJDIC, not the default one at Monash University. There’s also a Canadian mirror, as you surely know. But the backdoor seems only available at Monash (and I don’t know if the Monash server is still down too often recently).
This isn’t a dictionary per say but l find http://www.alc.co.jp/ to be excellent for looking up examples. Most of their examples seem to come from newspaper articles, so while they are correct, they might be a bit unnatural when used in a conversation. Either way, give it a try.
For Japanese-English, there’s a new interesting one at http://www.romajidesu.com/, which use database from WWWJDIC bit with a different representation which is quite easy to use.
