Thanks to a work mate for putting me on to this one:

Denshi Jisho

Finally, an easy to use, well-designed site for searching Jim Breen’s WWWJDIC dictionary/database.  It is the full gamut of references in one place:

• English to Japanese;
• Japanese to English;
• Kanji;
• Sentences!

A couple of things about this site have been a long time coming. The first thing that blows my mind (for how infrequently it is done) is that you can in romaji! How hard is that? Pretty, it would seem. J.B. does it. AnimeLab does it. And props to them for it, but their sites are a bit poxy on the eyes, and not the easiest in terms of usability. Not only have the fellows at Denshi Jisho made what I think is an elegant site, but  they have freed me from the fascist IT drones that obviously see no merit in Japanese language capabilities on 外人 computers in Japan. I would dearly love to wring their necks…

I digress. Denshi Jisho’s team provided us with two other things that I would gladly scrape at their feet for endowing us with:

1. A phrase dictionary: search for the Japanese equivalent of English sentences and vice versa;
2. A kanji dictionary: what does that kanji mean, and what kanji means that!

That’s it. My actual denshi jisho is now completely obsolete. My hefty kanji dictionary and three or four other misc. dictionaries are now nought better than bookshelf fillers. At least they continue to make me look erudite to callers, I suppose. I might take to receiving people in the library, casually leafing through one of them.

Yes. Yes. Indeed.

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