this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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were electronic dictionaries a bigger deal in japan than elsewhere? as far as i know, in america they were never anything more than novelties even before everyone had a computer in their pocket. i did a little googling and it seems like they were/are more common in japan but couldn't find any reference as to why. my only guess is that it has something to do with keeping track of kanji but in the 80s they probably weren't even capable of displaying kanji so /shrug
These dictionaries are a godsend for figuring out what a given kanji means, and how to pronounce it.
There are around 40 000 kanji characters. Most have various meanings depending on context. And depending on the context, a character is spoken in entirety different ways.
Phone dictionaries have been fine for kanji recognition and searching radicals for over 10 years.
I learnt Japanese in schooling from 2002 to 2011 and I was using my phone in the last two years of that.