Japanese ''denshi jisho''

 What is  a ''denshi jisho''?

It's a dictionnary. But not an ordinary one.

It litterally means: electronic dictionnary.

Now you must be asking yourself, why I'm writing about a dictionnary. Yes I write about the most random stuff. But when you think about it, aren' t those random stuff usually the most interesting and unexpected stuff ever?

 Denshi jisho is part of every Japanese people's every day life. It is light, small, and it actually looks like a small laptop, with a screen that you can light up, and a keyboard. Some of them also has tactile screens where you can write on with a special pen. This is very useful for us, as sometimes when searching a definition of a word, we don't even know how to read the word as we don't know the Chinese characters of it! In that case you take the pen and you write it down, instead of looking for the character first to know how to read it and THEN search the definition of the word like in the old days...

 It's in fact such an ordinary and unexciting tool for us, that we actually don't talk about it. The funny part is that it exists since the beginning of time in Japan, but each time my non-Japanese friends see it, they freak out as if I had between my hands the most coolest thing ever of the latest technology after the Iphone 5.

It is indeed, very cool, and incredibly useful. You can search definitions, or translate. In either way, you can choose to put different languages.For example, mine has French, Englism Japanese and Spanish in it. I can translate from frenc to Japanese, the other way around, translate that into Spanish, to end up with the French word.

You'd maybe think that you can do the same thing with internet... or even with your phone..

Yes maybe, but it's still something increadibly practicle, you don't need internet or nothing to do it, and it's faster to search with that.It also has other features, like remembering words, and you can create customised revision sheets with vocabulary of your choice etc.. It also can give you synonyms, create sentences to give you examples in which your word is used to better understand the meaning of it, etc. You can also connect it to the computer to download updates or to trasfer infor;ation that you had saved in the dictionnary to your computer!

There is a large variety of them, and the latest versions and cost up to 200 dollars!!