khatzumoto

Why Monolingual Dictionaries Are Worth Your Time

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A lot of you have posted various quite valid concerns about monolingual dictionaries. Perhaps you’re too slow with them. You have to look up words in order to understand the word you looked up in the first place.Et cetera. To me, all of that only underscores why we need to be using monolingual dictionaries. If…

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FAQ Section

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There is a new FAQ page up. Feel free to give it a look, it might save you having to send an email and wait for a reply. Of course, if your specific question is not answered, feel free to ask! When this site first started last year, I was getting these questions for the…

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I Meant To Do That

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Early in my time at a stuck-up, British elementary school (we called it “preparatory school”, some people call it “primary school”, the name doesn’t matter), a Canadian kid called Sean (or was it “Shaun”?…freaking variant spellings) transferred into my class. This kid was hilarious! He knew all kinds of playground games from his school in…

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There Was A Time When…

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For all of my early life, Japan seemed as far away and exotic to me as it must now to you. There was a time when I balked as a TV narrator commented that “the Japanese alphabet has over 2000 letters” (on a show called “Japan Video Topics” in the late 1980s/early 1990s). There was…

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How To Make the Transition to Monolingual Dictionaries

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Of course, the main reason I’m learning Chinese is because I love Chinese characters; they’re logical, useful and beautiful. But there is another motivation for this project — it acts as a sort of time machine, taking me back, if you will, to when I was first studying Japanese; this helps me better understand how…

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