Re: Native speaker intuition

From: Sean (seanpantsholland_at_telus.pants.net)
Date: 03/23/05 

Date: Wed, 23 Mar 2005 19:32:16 GMT

necoandjeff wrote:

> No, the point is that the vast majority of waei and eiwa dictionaries suck
> (in fact, I've never seen an exception although admittedly I haven't
> searched that hard), because they are primarily designed for native speakers
> of Japanese. The word 良知 was presumably found when looking up the word
> intuition in an eiwa dictionary. Of course a native speaker of Japanese
> would have heard or read the word intuition somewhere and would be looking
> it up to get a sense of what it means. He would already be armed with the
> knowledge that 良知 is a word that is hardly ever used by anybody, etc. But
> the author of the dictionary gives little thought to presenting the various
> alternatives (that are commonly used) to express the target word in Japanese
> and explaining what each means and how it is used.
>
> One of these days (when I retire) I'll shut up and write a couple of
> dictionaries like the ones I'm envisioning. For example, a waei dictionary
> that focuses on *explaining* the *meaning* of Japanese words (particularly
> the ones that don't map onto English very well) the way a kokugo jiten does,
> only in English, rather than just throwing out a bunch of unexplained one
> word equivalents and a few example sentences if you're lucky.
>
> Jeff
>

You're right. That's why I didn't jump to the conclusion that 良知 was
the word. I imagine many of us have had the experience in the early days
of stumbling along in broken Japanese, only to whip out some expression
found in a dictionary that has our Japanese friends stare at us in
disbelief and then burst out laughing because we'd suddenly, in the
middle of our caveman discourse, uttered some extremely arcane and
learned expression. It has happened to me more than once.

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