Re: [tlug] OT (sorta) A Langauge Question

[Jim Breen <Jim.Breen@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com> spake:
>> 
>> Kenkyusha's "Furigana English-Japanese Dictionary" is a must.  Most
>> English-Japanese dictionaries will spew kanji at you assuming that you
>> know what the reading is.

Blech. I bought that book years ago and found it very disappointing.
It was simply the small domestic Kenkyusha EJ with the English
pronunciations stripped out and furigana popped on every kanji. It made
no allowances or adjustments for the fact that the user is not an
NSoJ. The glosses/translations are totally in Japanese.

Then a few years back I was visiting Tom Gally (*) at his house in 
Yokohama and he mentioned that he and his wife had worked on the 
competing Kodansha Furigana English-Japanese Dictionary. He described
the work they did on it which included adding a heap of entries (the 
original didn't have "kimono" for example - after all what Japanese
person would ever look up "kimono" in an EJ dictionary. They also
added English translations of the Japanese examples of the usage of
words. After the visit I checked out the Kodansha Furigana EJ in a shop
and bought it. It's excellent. FAR better than the Kenkyusha one.

Cheers

Jim

(*) http://www.gally.net/

-- 
Jim Breen                                http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/
Clayton School of Information Technology,               Tel: +61 3 9905 9554
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia                  Fax: +61 3 9905 5146
(Monash Provider No. 00008C)                ジム・ブリーン@モナシュ大学