I have had a bit of a look around for a dictionary for Yomichan that will give definitions of Japanese words in simple Japanese but have yet to unearth any at all. I have heard anecdotally that this can be a much better way to learn Japanese.
I was wondering if anyone here has had experience with this method of learning, and if so are there any suggestions of what ones work best?
3 comments
If you’re referring to using mono-lingual dictionaries (Japanese-Japanese dictionary), then there’s no “simple” alternative.
If you’re considering this, then I’m assuming your Japanese is at a level where this is feasible/practical. If you’re not advanced/intermediate yet, then I do suggest going back to Japanese-English dictionaries. A quick way to know is if you’re struggling to read the Japanese definitions even for simple words. Yomichan even has a feature to look up words within definitions, and if you are looking up definitions of definitions, you are trading off a lot of time to gain comprehension, when a J-E dictionary could give you the meaning in seconds.
But if you are quite advanced, then mono-lingual dictionaries do boost your comprehension significantly, as J-J dictionaries often contain more meanings and phrases than conventional J-E dictionaries.
Just google monolingual dictionaries for Yomichan and you should be able to find some good options (once again, they are not “simple”).
I use dictionaries such as 実用日本語表現辞典 and 旺文社国語辞典 第十一版 画像無し.
Advice at the top of this post. If you don’t want my advice just skip to the last line for a straight answer.
> I have heard anecdotally that this can be a much better way to learn Japanese.
I always push back on this because there’s so many people that focus so much on the “monolingual transition” but my personal advice is that there’s nothing wrong with using J-E dictionaries even at high levels of Japanese. Anything that helps you understand the general meaning of a sentence you are trying to understand and lets you move on so you can keep reading more and more sentences is the best way to learn the language. That can be a J-J dictionary if you prefer it, but there’s no reason to go out of your way to specifically use **only** J-J and ignore J-E. Using bilingual dictionaries worked when I was learning English, and I’m fluent in it now, and bilingual dictionaries are working for me with Japanese too just fine. I use jisho/jmdict (which is not perfect, just to be clear) a good 80+% of the time when I read, and only dip into J-J dictionary definitions (which I have no trouble understanding, for the most part) only when something is unclear from the context and the English translation, or if I want to know more about it (or if it doesn’t exist on jisho).
Jmdict/Jisho is also incredibly good at picking up a lot of slang, expressions, stuff that is often not clearly listed in a J-J dictionary because of special usages or conjugations (like 思える vs 思う) as a separate entry but that would force you to read through an entire page (for the verb 思う for example) to find that one specific usage that you’re looking for.
To give you an example using English, imagine you’re trying to figure out what a certain word means. Do you think it’s faster to understand what it is if I tell you:
> a system for converting visual images (with sound) into electrical signals, transmitting them by radio or other means, and displaying them electronically on a screen.
Or maybe it’s much easier and more immediate if I tell you that the word means >!Television!<?
At the end of the day, you have access to a lot of different tools, including J-E dictionaries, so don’t be afraid to use them if they are useful to you. There’s no reason to stick to only one or the other, you can (and should) use both J-E and J-J dictionary however much you like.
With this said, **to answer your original question, I personally use 大辞林 the most with yomichan as my J-J dictionary.**
Just install all of the dictionaries from TheMoeWay’s Bilingual Dictionary section, enable them all, and disable until you end up with what feels right for you. I ended up with 新和英 (good compliment to JMDict) > デジタル大辞泉 (generally long and extensive Japanese defintiions) > ハイブリッド新辞林 (much more concise Japanese definitions when the former are too long or unclear).