I am using other kinds of resources including monolingual dictionaries but I would love to have something like this in the arsenal as well. Currently there are times I am prompting AI to do things like: generate definitions for target word; generate definitions for synonyms; remove any matching pairs from the first list and only then show me the first list, and elaborate on what was cut and what was kept. This gets me a fairly thorough discussion of what sets related words apart. Of course I verify anything I get this way, but it is very effective during some parts of my routine. Iâm finding it boosting my comprehension as I SRS newly learned words and go back into immersion more than even monolingual dictionaries doâeven the mistakes sometimes help me cue in more finely on the nuance myself, because they usually have me looking in the right place for the nuance.
Still it would obviously be better ifâfor those timesâI could replace it with a tangible resource. Is there any bilingual dictionary that is searchable online that gives, say, anywhere from 1-4 paragraphs for its definitions as a rule?
For freely available online JE dictionaries Iâm only aware of three:
EDICT, which is the data source for pretty much every free JE dictionary app and website; provides short glosses only
https://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/ does lookups on multiple dictionaries including the Progressive JE dictionary; this has short glosses only, but lots of example sentences
Wiktionary includes JE content
In general I think paragraph length definitions are going to be impossible to find even from commercial dictionary sources, because the usual standard for dictionary definitions is to keep them as succinct as possible, deriving from space constraints for printed paper dictionaries. (EDICT is electronic only, but its editorial standard deliberately aims for terse glosses.)
And I also donât care whether theyâre officially classified âas dictionariesâ as long as they 1. have a reasonable number of words or at least reach outside the most basic frequency bracket and 2. explicitly elaborate on word nuances. Iâve found a couple books that are about honing in on commonly confused pairings of words (I saw an entry for ăăĄă« vs ăăă ă« on an early page just to give a simple exampleâthey do get more advanced than that, but itâs still a case where a normal bilingual would just say something like âduringâ) and then providing both contrasting sentences and explicit English discussion. So this is excellent for me, and if they donât cover the 30k words needed to make a proper full dictionary, thatâs no reason not to include them when I am looking words up. Four good books like that might end up covering the full range where nuance needs that much attention, anyway.