My Japanese wife has had a good Seiko SII electronic dictionary for years. It works well and has an unbelievable long battery life, but friends tell us the newer ones are far superior in content and ease of use.
Searches result in an embarrassment of riches, with a surprising number of these things. Seiko alone seems to have a half dozen different ones as do many other companies.
Anybody have any recommendations for a good one?
If it ain’t broke…
Is there any specific feature either of you are looking for, like a larger display, bigger database, specialty dictionaries (like medical or financial), audio, training tools (some of the PSP and Nintendo DS software can grade your pronunciation), or more compact size?
Everyone in my house is asleep right now, so I’ll wait until later before asking what my wife and Mother-in-law use.
Main things wanted are larger dictionary that is more up-to-date, a bigger display, and especially a voice to give correct English pronunciation of words.
My first post (sorry for the delay, New Year’s is a hectic time), was made with the plan of checking what my wife uses and recommending something like that, since it seems to be very useful, but I just found she’s using a Seiko S-II as well.
So… since I’m not in the market for one and haven’t thought about them, I guess my only advice would be to head down to a shop that sells them (if that’s not too much of a problem, given your location listing) and just grab a bunch of product brochures to take home and decide what features are really important to you. When you go to buy one, try it out to make sure it’s convenient to use (one problem with smaller size and more features is that the controls can become ridiculously tiny and complicated).
The Japan Shop has a good comparison chart of the different brands and features although it’s more oriented towards the English speaker learning Japanese. A quick glance doesn’t show any that speak tho’. Can your wife ask any of her friends and family back in Japan what they like?
I keep thinking of updating mine too. I’ve got a seven year old Canon Wordtank that I still use daily but the newer models are tempting.
Get one that has either the Longman or Oxford corpus. Also, try to get one that can be updated on-line.
In case anybody is interested:
After a fair amount of research online, we decided on this model Which has quite a few advantages, albeit expensive. The Ectaco EJ-800 Japanese-English Translator has a large, color, touch screen, huge Japanese dictionary as well as English ones. You can get native voices in both languages for pronunciation, it has complete phrases, voice recognition and a host of other goodies.
Ectaco’s website sells it for $100 more than Amazon and some other vendors, so we ordered it there. It may be overkill, but she reads a lot of English books and magazines and uses the old one all the time. So, in the spirit of Christmas, I got it for her.
You might want to take into consideration that the English corpus for that model is not based on usage (they way people actually speak and write), but rather on linguistic theories (particularly, grammar), which lacks some of the most important information that English learners need to know. (For example, phrases which are spoken only, or highly context sensitive, etc.) I assume Amazon has a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, so use it to run some key words/phrases through (both ways) to make sure it’s at least as thorough as your old one. The sheer number of words/phrases isn’t enough.
Thanks, guizot, good points. I did the Amazon thing just because of their return policy.
I have an ancient Canon Wordtank IDX9500, that now that I think of it is almost 12 years old. It has served me well. But, I have been looking over the past few months at getting a replacement for it. Most importantly I wanted one that can do handwriting recognition and has a good vocabulary of technical terms.
I haven’t bought it yet, but I think I’ve settled on the Canon Wordtank V300. Certainly it’s geared more towards Japanese people learning English than vice-versa, but that seems to be more like what you need anyway. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to play with one in person to see if I really like it, but the feature set seems very solid.
I’ve used a few, but there’s a large difference in needs between native English speakers and native Japanese, so I don’t think my experiences will be of help.
The one you have found seems interesting. Let us know how she likes it.