Sometimes if I read the Kanji and give the meaning based upon my understanding of the kanji Wanikani tells me I am wrong yet if I cut across to Jisho my answer was correct. Usually among many meaning for the Vocab but it is frustrating to get it marked wrong in Wanikani.
For example:
こんかい 今回 in Jisho means - now; this time; lately
But Wanikani marks Now and lately as wrong.
当たる I put “to be successful” was marked wrong and yet this is one of the meanings on Jisho.
Is one right or wrong?
Just a bit frustrating as you feel you are right but you are stucj at Apprentice again!
My impression is that WK is largely based on JMdict (the underlying J-E dictionary of many services because it’s free and machine-readable).
But jisho lists rather more than less meanings, and in WK the entries are edited by native speakers. For example I don’t feel that 今回 particularly means now.
Thanks Leebo - hmmm sounds like I am giving Jisho more credit than maybe it deserves?? Just a little wird that the meaning I thought was right was on Jisho but wrong on Wanikani! Not a big deal just found it a bit strange.
Thanks
Just noting that Jisho isn’t the definitive source on translating Japanese words into English. It has plenty of gaps and mistakes, because it is edited by regular people who submit the info.
It reads from various databases that you could go contribute to right now if you want.
WK will always fail to overlap perfectly with every single E-J dictionary.
Gotcha thanks - I tend to go to Jisho when I am looking for a word translation - usually no good if I am looking for a phrase. Thanks for the heads-up on the gaps and mistakes - makes me aware that I need to double reference at least!!
Kenkyusha New Japanese-English Dictionary, “The Green Goddess”, the most authoritative Japanese-English dictionary around, considered a “Bible” in translator circles, does list “now” among it’s glosses for 今回. Don’t assume that just because you don’t particularly feel a translation matches a word that the dictionary entry is wrong.
All dictionaries are “edited by regular people” last time I checked. Jisho is based on JMDict/EDICT which has an editorial board with 8 people on it. Nothing gets accepted as an entry without being double checked by one or two of the 8 editors, some of them (like Jim Breen himself) has been at it for almost 30 years, which is for how long EDICT has been around. (see this article)
Sure, there are mistakes and gaps in JMDict, but again, this applies to all dictionaries. As a professional translator, I rank JMDict very highly and it absolutely compares favorably to even the best paid-for J-E dictionaries, esp. when it comes to slang and contemporary Japanese.
Jisho isn’t just JMDict. Things like furigana, inflections, example sentence pairing, etc, are handled on the platform, and that’s developed by one guy as far as I can tell. He does respond (eventually) to things about those kinds of errors on the Jisho forum, but they’re fairly rampant. Additionally, the example sentences come from sources that are not editorially reviewed.
By regular people, obviously I meant “people with no particular credentials to publish a dictionary” (presumably… this was several months ago, after all) and while JMDict is getting checked at some level by experts, Jisho as a whole is not, from what I can tell, so JMDicts integrity only goes so far in that regard.
I’m not sure if I were to become a translator that I would use it, I’m no expert on anything, but I’ve seen enough errors to make me always double check with other resources.
It’s not like any of the kanji have official English translations, so as long as you feel a translation still demonstrates you understand the meaning of the kanji, and you can back that up from experience with its Japanese usage or other English resources, go ahead and add it as a synonym. WK can’t catch all of them.
I also second Leebo on jisho.org never being the last stop for looking up good English equivalents. It’s a start, but from there I start running searches for Japanese example sentences, Japanese dictionaries, or ways Japanese speakers have translated English equivalents into their own language (so, cross-referencing with Japanese-English online dictionaries). It’s good for quick understanding, but you don’t get a whole lot of nuance from it, and sometimes the most awkward translations come up first.