3 Good Reasons to Use a Monolingual Japanese Dictionary

Why Your Monolingual Japanese Dictionary is a Secret Weapon

A friend of mine recently told me that they had been learning Japanese vocabulary the wrong way. They had set up their profile on a popular kanji learning tool so it would display the English word alongside the kanji and an example Japanese sentence.

asbestos :: lost :: dictionary by jackace, on Flickr | CC BY-NC 2.0

They found they were getting trained to know what the English word was and the translate that word into Japanese. When they turned off the English translation suddenly they had no idea what any of the readings were, even though they knew the meaning. Now they are using all items in Japanese all of the time and gaining a more natural understanding of the language. In this post I'd like to show you some good reasons to lose your bilingual dictionary and go native with a Japanese monolingual dictionary.

Learn Japanese with Brett on eduFire

There is nothing stopping you from picking up a second language right now. Millions of people all around the world are using the Internet to enhance their language skills. Live video learning is just one way of doing it.

I've recently created a profile on eduFire and I've started taking on students in English and Japanese. Ultimately I want to share with you some of the methods I have for learning a second language, because I believe any one can do it, and the Internet makes so many things possible.

Here is my introductory video for edufire, which I posted on YouTube just a couple of weeks ago. I'll be making many more basic Japanese lessons over the next couple of months and I hope that you'll tune in and just take a look. Even if you never subscribe or take a live online lesson with me I hope that you will feel my enthusiasm for languages and learning.