It’s not that there’s no valuable content in here, it’s just a very large post that kinda passes by the point Khatz really wanted to make. If you look in the post that’s about monolingual dictionaries that isn’t crossed out, he says to basically ignore this post.

To answer your question, in case you don’t go read that post, you just need to look up really easy words you already know like  man（おとこ・男）, woman（おんな・女）, color（いろ・色）, blue（あお・青）, red (あか・赤）, fish (魚), sushi(You’re on you’re own here, man), etc.

The post can be found at: /how-to-really-make-the-transition-to-monolingual-dictionaries

I realize there is no exact answer, but I’m just starting AJATT and I’m already beating myself up for not using a monodic even though I hardly know any kanji and only occasionally want to look-up words I hear in songs or on tv. On the upside, Khatzumoto is completely successful at making me feel guilty every time I expose myself to English, but I’d like to have a feasible idea of what’s possible and how hard I should push myself.

Thanks 🙂

Because of that, I want to jump right into monolingual SRSing, but I’m not really sure what an example monolingual card would look like for a European language like this (as in: no readings, etc.)

¡Gracias por la idea!

First of all, can anyone recommend an “offline” dictionary; similar to Yahoo!辞書? Due to the nature of my work (moving around alot), I don’t often have a reliable net connection, and I want to go monodic as soon as possible. So if anyone can recommend a good one (with example sentences), I’d be eternally greatful!

Secondly, I’m currently going through RTK, as I’m basically starting my studies in Japanese studies from scratch (thanks AJATT!), can anyone tell me, once they get comfortable using a monodic, but perhaps they want to continue to revise old kanji, or learn new ones beyond the 2000 or so that are recommended, do they translate the RTK definitions into Japanese as well? I imagine it would be quite counter productive thinking of unknown kanji definitions in English – after all the whole point is to think and talk as a native speaker. Can anyone give some insight?

Other than that, thanks heaps Khatzumoto, I’ll buy you a beer (I’m serious) when I’m fluent and back in Japan.

I look up a word. Any word. And then I look at the definition. Its in Japanese, a language which I don’t know, but am trying to learn.

So one, I don’t know what the word I’m looking up means, and since I don’t understand the language (hence why I looked up the word in the first place), I don’t understand the definition of the word that comes out of the dictionary.

So I run around for 20 minutes looking up the words that come out of the dictionary, until I finally see something I understand, which is completely unrelated to the first word I looked up because I’ve been clicking on links for so long.

Lemme explain it this way:

You look up Startrek on wiki because you don’t know what Startrek is, you don’t understand a word wiki is saying, so you keep clicking on likes. 10 minutes late, you open a page called Halflife. Startrek isn’t Halflife. They’re both science fiction, but thats pretty much where all the similarities stop 😉

Ok, sorry to sound like a huge ass, maybe I’m just not at the right stage to start using a monolingual, but to be honest, how are we supposed to know when to make the jump?

forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=20398#p20398

people have recently changed it around, made some anki decks, whatever floats your boat the most, take a look at it.

(My example sentence): くすりを一思いにのみこんだ。

Now in my case, I understand that くすり is medicine, and the rest I can vaguely make out has something to do with drinking it *duh* (のみ…). I had no idea what 一思いに meant, so I use yahoo辞書

(The example sentence
that Yahoo辞書　gives
for 一思いに ) : ［副］あれこれ迷わず、一気にそうするさま。思い切って。「いっそ―別れてくれ」
without Rikaichan *gotta love it* I would have no idea what any of this means, but regardless, your advice is to input this sentence with the rest into my anki’s additional definitions instead of using English right?

…But I can’t remember what I said, but I don’t think it was important…

Any help would be appreciated. ^_^ Thanks