Your First Monolingual Dictionary
As you progress in your language acquisition journey, one useful tactic to really grow you vocabulary fast is to switch to a monolingual dictionary, Japanese-Japanese, as soon as you are able. Rather than relying on the translators’ interpretation of a given word’s meaning and how it’s used in sample sentences, you can go straight to the source and see how Japanese natives explain the word in their own tongue.
An additional benefit of using a J-J dictionary is that as you’re working through the definition, when you see new words that you don’t know, you can add those to your study list and continue down the path until you get to core, essential words that you know and then can build back up from there deepening your understanding. Computer nerds (like me) refer to this as a “depth-first tree search.”
The challenge is that most academic and online dictionaries are targeted towards literate adults and that search process above can become very extensive, even if you’re at the upper beginner/intermediate stage.
The solution? Find a dictionary targeted for school-aged children. I stumbled across this by accident while browsing at Kinokuniya one day. I was thumbing through just such a dictionary and noticed that the vocabulary used in the definitions was largely intelligible to me, the sample sentences were brief and to the point, and there were lots of illustrations to support the definitions. I bought it on the spot and found it exceptionally useful in making the transition from E-J to J-J.
There are many available, this happens to be the one I bought: https://amzn.to/2XwF63o
You can go digital, too, but for learning purposes, I prefer the old-school print style, as I’ve found the illustrations to be useful and I just like thumbing through it and stumbling upon new words. If you do choose to go digital, here’s an example of one app I like that I use on my iPad.
Action Step
Get online or better yet, go to your nearest Japanese bookstore, browse some dictionaries aimed at children and buy one. Pick a word you want to understand and start your journey into the world of J-J definitions!