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

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

Jim Breen wrote:

>"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.
>  
>

I have several print dictionaries, including a large J-E Kenkyusha, but
does anyone remember the scandal when a team of native English speaking
university professors took a good look at just one letter in the
Kenkyusha Lighthouse dictionary? It was pretty incredible what they
found! Kenkyusha tried to hide the facts by buying up the small book
that came out and by saying that maybe the examples were slightly old at
times, but that they weren't wrong. In actual fact though, many of them
were very definitely wrong (the example English sentences I mean);
others were questionable; and others right, but not optimal. Since them,
I've never quite trusted Kenkyusha, although some electronic
dictionaries I have that use it don't seem to be too bad. The problem,
by the way, was with English example sentences in their E-J dictionary.....

Lyle

PS I have that book somewhere... if I can find it, I'll post some
examples. Once the blatantly wrong parts were laid bare, Kenkyusha
rushed to fix the next edition of the dictionary, and maybe they even
overhauled the entire thing? So, due to that, maybe it's a good one now?
Personally, I've always preferred either Sanseido for J-E (weird example
sentences at times, but good at explaining the meaning of the J-word
being looked up) and Shogakukan (which tends to use real Engliish for
the example sentences).