Buying a Nintendo 3DS over a electronic Dictionary - Japanese/English Dictionary

It was some time ago that I thought it was about time to get a electronic dictionary, esp because i'm meeting a Japanese friend once a week for 1-on-1 English/Japanese lessons. Having a dictionary is just plain helpful, esp if you can enter kanji in it.

So the features I really wanted were Kanji entry, Jap/Eng dictionary (and of course the opposite), and some good examples in the definitions.

Well, I finally finished looking around the shops and figuring out what the best product would be for me. I checked out a whole bunch of the new Electronic Dictionaries...

They were all about 3man yen (30,000en). The thing I learned quickly about them is that even though they have 100`s of dictionaries, I'd only ever use the Genius Jap/Eng and Eng/Jap dictionary. The rest of the dictionaries were simply in the way, or at least I would rarely use them. The good thing about all of them was the Kanji input, but that is pretty standard these days. Another thing the Electronic dictionaries have over the Nintendo 3DS dictionary software is that you can easily use the jump function (this lets you jump to unknown words from another words definition). The 3DS's jump function only jumps to English words. However, the EDs wasn't great either. Sometime it would not jump to the English definition, only the definition of a word in Japanese. Another thing I found on some Electronic Dictionaries is that it was missing (or damn hard to find) the Jap/Eng dictionary. Maybe I just missed something, but some were plain simple to enter Kanji and get the English definition and others I couldn't figure out.

In the end, I got the Nintendo 3DS with the Kanji Sonomama software. The 3DS worked out to be about 22,000yen. That was about 8,000 yen cheaper than most of the other dictionaries which allowed me to buy the dictionary and another game for about 8,000 yen. I haven't regretted my decision. I found it was quite forgiving of my rough kanji entry. If you get it wrong you can pick from a group of alternates. Also, you can overcome the failure of the jump function by simply looking at the Kanji on the top screen, while entering the kanji you want to search on the bottom touch screen. The software has Eng/Jap, Jap/Eng, and a Chinese dictionary. Another thing I love about the Kanji Sonomama is that it has great usage examples in each definition. This is really great when you trying to figure out how to use a new word, and it gives you some examples you can walk away with. Kanji Sonomama uses the Genius dictionary (which pretty much all of the ED use). The 3DS also starts up quick from sleep mode and you can be enter kanji just as quick as any other Electronic dictionary.

So yeah, that is how it went. If you are thinking about this yourself, I'd suggest you take a look at a decent cellphone (you may have one already). If you can download a good app it would be a lot more convenient and less expensive. If you just want a 3DS, you have even better reasons now. If you do decide on the 3DS, check out the Nintendo eStore (which should open soon), it may have a cheap dictionary or something.
Some points to test in Electronic dictionaries:

• Test the jump function. How well does it work? Does it actually jump to English definitions (some don't)
• Does it have both Jap/Eng and Eng/Jap dictionary? Does it have the dictionaries you want (if you want Chinese too or something).
• Does it correctly identify the kanji you enter?
• Does it have examples for each definition? These really help.

That's about it ;)