Definitely hoping to do this when I achieve higher skill in my japanese! Thanks!
The way I did it for a long time was to copy and paste the Japanese definition from https://www.weblio.jp/ into Jisho.org. Jisho allows you to put in whole sentences and then click on each word individually to get the definitions one at a time. In that way, even if I couldn’t read the definition on my own, and even with limited grammar knowledge, I could work out a lot of the meaning, usually enough to get the general nuance of a word. It’s a bit time consuming, but it’s worth it and I think it pays off in the long run.
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I didn’t think about it like that, seems like a great idea while i’m still getting up to speed!
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Sanseido (三省堂) has a pretty good Japanese-language dictionary online based on one of their children’s dictionaries. It’s pretty nice for getting dead-simple definitions of words meant for Japanse children.
Their definitions in this case are pretty much in line with what @bnheise mentioned above.
If you need help parsing those Japanese definitions, there are several browser plugins of varying ages (Rikaikun, Rikaichan, RikaiRebuilt, Yomichan など…) that will let you mouseover the words to get a definition inline. You can also paste the whole thing into ichi.moe, which probably does a generally better job than Jisho of breaking a sentence apart.
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Thanks! I am actually very actively using Rikaikun for my online studies and it helps a great deal. Its just great to have something show the meanings almost instantly, especially when theres a lot to read!
I really wouldn’t say my Japanese is probably that much better than yours then. I do still use jisho and other J-E dictionaries regularly, but I also try to use an online J-language dictionary coupled with yomichan and it has worked well enough for me. It’s still challenging as hell, naturally, but challenging yourself sometimes is key to improvement. Try to throw yourself in the deep end now and then, you might be surprised with how fast you get used to the water!
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Thanks, I do like having the challenge but with my finals coming up i’ve been looking for some more resources to ease the process. Cant have stress building up more than it already is 
Can I ask you about why you use Yomichan over Rikaikun? I haven’t used yomichan but rikaikun pretty much translates kanji word for word, i’m wondering if there are any major differences between the two that makes you prefer one over the other.
I would also recommend this dictionary.
It’s not cheap but the definitions are not super difficult to read.
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Its pretty expensive for an app but I would check it out if it had an android version, seems like its for ios only? A quick search doesn’t show any google play results sadly.
I think when the earlier popular one went kaput (devlopment was discontinued I think?) I switched to Yomichan based on some Reddit recommendation threads or I saw, or something along those lines. I really don’t have any strong loyalties to a particular translation addon, so if someone was to present a case that another one works better than Yomichan, I wouldn’t be opposed to switching over. I’m on Firefox. As far as I know they’re all fairly similar with a handful of different features and sometimes different dictionaries, but I haven’t really looked into it much.
Edit: I searched for Rikaisama replacements and this article came up, I think I might have used it to decide when I switched over.
http://learnjapaneseonline.info/2017/12/06/rikaisama-is-dead-its-yomichan-vs-rikaichamp-the-review/
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One way in which you can neatly see the various vocabs (for a quick overview) that mean similar things is using niai. Example for “underground”: Niai
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this is a good differentiation. Kinda fits with how i figured they are separated. For me I always figured 地中 was like 水中 where you are underwater but that also means you are in the water, so you are in the dirt. For 地下 I figured the first kanji uses its other meaning in ground as a level or current state and not just meaning dirt, so you are below ground level.
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That’s what I understood from the other examples listed in those words.
For 地下 the other examples list basement and cellar and I know it-s also used for 地下鉄 which is a basic word and all of those are man made things underground.
For 地中 it remainded me to 水中 which means literally underwater (Inside the water) so I just guessed it had kinda of the same meaning. Something inside the earth.
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That seems like a really cool website, also shows the frequency of the words it pulls up in the searches!
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Just keep in mind that the frequency relates to the whole vocab, it doesn’t incorporate the contextual meaning of course. So that means, as an example, for the “underground” meaning, 地下 is much more common than 黒い (obviously)
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Thanks, I was wondering a bit why 黒い was used more than 地下 but as you said, I quickly realized it is searched more for the main meaning. But it also shows that 地下 is searched much more than 地中 which helps a lot in the sense that it is probably a much more frequent word in readings (I guess).
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