Word context dictionary

Japanese Language Resources
1

Hello comrades,

I am looking for a dictionary online (free), a website or an android application that could give me more information on words than just the meaning.
For example, when I learn kanji and verb related to them, I often get said by my Japanese relatives that these words are only used in very polite expressions or in books or very long time ago and not used anymore.
That’s why, in order to learn the words correctly I would like to have a tool which give me the meaning of words and especially the context of them.

Do you know this kind of tool ? Is my question not clear enough ?

P.S. : Sorry for my bad English

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2

I’m not sure if that’s exactly what you’re looking for, but Weblio gives you examples of usage in short sentences or fragments so you can have a general idea.

3

eijiro/alc has pretty good context/usage
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The (free) pro lite account also allows you to see example sentences/text

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Kotobank also has some brief examples I look at sometimes.
https://kotobank.jp/jeword/<<KEYWORD>>

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4

on jisho.org, use #sentence in order to get it to give you a bunch of sentences based on the word or character.

5

I would suggest avoiding those sentences, they are from Tanaka, many of which are uncorrected sentences written by non-native speakers of both Japanese and English. Which means many are incorrect or awkward on both sides.

ALC and Weblio are both good suggestions. Just be aware that Weblio also uses Tanaka / Tatoeba among other corpora.

Also, if you have a Mac, the Wisdom E-J dictionary on there is great.

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6

Mmm… Sounds like you might be looking for a japanese collocation resource… There’re books with list of common collocations.

Collocations are paired words that you find commonly used together in some language. They can be helpful to give content to given words :+1:

EDIT: now carefully reading your request , seems your looking more of a social context to words rather than anything else :sweat_smile: …

7

Yes it is more like you said !
I need to know in which context a word is used, if it’s only used by superior or inferior (in hierarchy), if the word is not used anymore, if the word is not polite, …
What’s the point of learning words if we don’t use them correctly ?

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