I’m trying to encourage my students to use the English-English dictionary instead of relying too much on English-Japanese ones. I want to give some examples of words that are paired in the dictionary, but have significant differences in definition, usage or nuance.
For example, one of my students got an answer wrong on a standardized test because of the definition of “sophisticated”. Her Japanese dictionary said it was 洗練された, which she associated with a wabi-sabi kind of simplicity. However, the Oxford Learner’s dictionary defines sophisticated as “clever and *complicated*”, which was also the correct answer on the test.
Can anyone give me any other examples like this? The only other one I can think of is “mendou kusai” being translated to “troublesome”, but I’d like to use more academic vocabulary as examples.
by RedPanda_Kyoushi