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Useful English-Japanese Handheld Dictionaries?
srothroc asks: "I've been interested in finding one of these, but I'm not too sure where to start looking. I've been around the block talking to students and my professor - most people either don't need one for some reason or the other or only use paper dictionaries. Online searches have been fruitless as well, so I turn to you, Slashdot. The ideal dictionary would be able to take hiragana/katakana input and give output in English, hiragana, katakana, and/or kanji. A lot of the ones that I've seen take English (romaji) input and spit out the same - not something I'd need. I would prefer options that wouldn't bust my wallet, as Christmas season is coming around. Any ideas, folks?"
Just buy a cheap PDA, either Palm or Pocket PC, and install dictionary software on it. For Palm you can get the shareware KDIC. It gives you more flexibility and choices than a dedicated dictionary.
Unfortunately the Wordtank is going to be a big pain in the butt for kanji lookups, it's barely better than a paper dictionary, since you need to use the same index system as a paper dict. That is, you need to know the stroke count and the radical, or the reading, just to locate the kanji. Once you're there, you can then use "jumping search" to find jukugo using that kanji. A Wordtank is barely faster than a paper dict when looking up kanji. But it does the job, and it's lighter than most paper dicts. The WT's best feature is kana J-E lookups, they're very fast, and you'd use that a lot. The WT also has an English menu mode and also has a flashcard function, so you can mark words as you do lookups and drill them later. The WT also has furigana above kanji, which aren't available on many devices targeted at native Japanese users (i.e. the Seiko units).
I still think beginners (especially absolute newbie beginners) start with a cheap "learner's dictionary." They're cheap, which is good because you'll toss it out later when you get better. Definitions and examples are usually expanded and more appropriate for learners. There are kanji learner's dictionaries too. These wouldn't necessarily be appropriate for advanced students, but they're great for beginners. People have spent hundreds of years figuring out the best ways to study Japanese and the best methods are still often the traditional ones. Just as an example, I have never seen any beginning Japanese computer instruction programs that weren't anything but pure crap.
One more cautionary tale about dictionaries. I once wrote an essay for my J class about the working hours of Japanese vs. American workers. After the class, the teacher came up to me with the essay, pointed to a word I'd picked from a dictionary that translated as "worker," and asked, "WHERE did you get THAT word?? I want you to completely forget that word exists, and use the regular conventional word. You chose a word with a very derogatory connotation." I admitted I just picked it out of a dictionary, I assumed it was a perfectly good synonym and used it because I was bored writing the same word for "worker" over and over. So a dictionary won't teach you everything about a word.