When you're a beginner at Japanese, it SUCKS trying to look up words you don't know. Specifically, you'll probably run into two problems:

1) There's a word that you want to look up, but you don't know its kanji, which means, in turn, that you don't know how to look it up in a dictionary.

For a real example that happened to a friend recently, let's say you're reading some manga that doesn't have furigana (= hiragana on top of kanji so that you know how to read them). You get through like two or three pages without looking up a single word, and you're starting to feel like a boss. But then, boom. Ridiculous kanji in your face:

喧嘩

You see that word, and you're like WTF, man?! (Props to those of you that can read this, by the way.) And your life is ruined. And you might spend a very long time trying to figure out what this word means.

The worst part is that this is a very common word: 喧嘩 = けんか = kenka = “fight; quarrel." It's probably in your intro to Japanese book. But when it's in that book, they probably write it in katakana （ ケンカ ） or hiragana （ けんか ）. Also, it's not one of the “general-use characters" (=Jōyō Kanji), so even if you've learned “all of the kanji," you still probably don't know it.

2) You find a word in a dictionary, but either: (a) There aren't any example sentences attached, or (b) You're not sure if the example sentences alongside it are natural things that Japanese people actually say.

I have learned so many Japanese words that other Japanese people don't know or use. In other words, I've wasted a lot of time learning words that don't improve my functional Japanese ability.

Long story short, we're going to need some good tools for looking up words that we don't know, along with ways to look up natural phrasing for those words. When possible, I'll also explain some little tricks for dealing with the two problems above.

For each online dictionary listed, rather than explain boring features, I'll just walk through an example.

Before I reached an advanced level of Japanese, Jisho.org was my go-to resource for looking up any and all Japanese words. I'm not sure if it's an effect of my skills improving or technology changing, but nowadays I almost never use this site, opting for other resources that I will be describing in a moment.

The thing that I like about Jisho.org is that it's very beginner-friendly.

Here's a screenshot of the homepage:

Now, let's say I'm trying to look up that word 喧嘩. I don't know how to pronounce this word, so I'm going to click on “Kanji by radicals:"

This will take me to a page with a bunch of scary kanji radicals (Note: a “radical" is essentially just a kanji building block.):

I scroll through and find the pieces of the first kanji, 喧. This will seem exhausting the first handful of times that you do it, but you kind of get used to it after a while… maybe. Anyways, looking through the pieces of kanji on the chart, I find and click the little “mouth" (from left side of the character), then the “roof" (from the top right side):

Just by clicking those, Jisho.org narrows it down to 42 possible kanji for me, and, scrolling along, I find it:

Yay! So I click on that guy, and it brings me to the kanji's page, where I can see a whole bunch of information about it:

Now I click on “Words containing," so that I can see words that this (quite rare) kanji shows up in:

33 words pop up. And, what do you know, the first one on the list is my word:

But sometimes clicking one kanji will bring up thousands of words. When that happens, it helps to tick the “Common words only" box and then hit search:

That narrows it down to only two words, both of which you should know if you're planning to be a boss at Japanese:

If you tick the box for “Common words only," but you don't see the word you're looking for, then maybe it's not that important for you to know anyways, or not important enough for you to spend yet even more time searching for it, so you can just skip it and go on reading your manga.

If you want to see this word used in a sentence, you could click the “Sentences" link next to it. Or, per my advice, you could copy and paste it into our next online dictionary…

Weblio

The main reason that I love Weblio so much is that the website pulls words, definitions, and example sentences from a wide variety of dictionaries.

Here's the homepage: http://ejje.weblio.jp/:

You'll notice that there are a bunch of ads, which is one of the downsides to Weblio, as they can become a bit obtrusive at times. They also offer “Weblio Premium," a paid, ad-free version that I'm way too cheap to even consider.

Anyways, from the homepage there are really only a few links you need to understand:

You can see that there a bunch of tabs that we can use. However, you'll probably only need the first two: J-E, E-J Dictionary (英和・和英辞典 / waei-eiwa jiten) and (English) Example Sentences (英語例文 / eigo reibun). I've already typed (or copied and pasted) the word I want to look up into the search bar: 喧嘩, and my cursor is hovering over the search button.

I click it, and…

I get a whole bunch of words. I can also scroll down further to look at entries from other dictionaries:

Some of you might be thinking, that's cool and all, but I can't read all of those kanji, so I'd be totally lost. Well, later I'll introduce Ninja Tool #7, which will solve this problem for you. For now, let's just not worry about it.

The real value of Weblio is in the database of example sentences that it has access to. Let's go take a look at it by clicking the Example Sentences link at the top of the page. You can find a link for it just above the first entry. It says 例文 (reibun):

Here are my results:

At the top right there, you'll see that it pulled 342 sentences. This actually isn't very many, though, for such a common word. The reason is that the dictionary is only looking up example sentences that use the kanji. So, let's try this again with only the hiragana for 喧嘩, which is けんか:

17,668 sentences! Wow. But that's way too many for me to even fathom. Also, some of the sentences are going to be a little strange, because they're not all from reliable sources. However, we have a trick for that.

Weblio pulls example sentences from a lot of different dictionaries. You can see which source an example sentence is being pulled from by looking at the text that comes after the little audio icon:

Some of these sources are much more reliable than others when it comes to finding natural, correct sentences and translations. Here are tips for choosing reliable example sentences:

• Anything that has the words 研究社 (kenkyuusha) next to it is probably good, because it's made by Kenkyusha, which is a legitimate dictionary-writing company.
  
• It helps to look at dictionaries that have 和英 (waei) (Japanese à English) written, instead of 英和 (eiwa) (English à Japanese), because we are looking for sentences that started out as Japanese, not weird Japanese that someone wrote trying to translate an English phrase.
  
• Leave out anything that has the word Weblio in it, because a lot of those tend to have strange English and/or Japanese. I think it's because the people writing them are volunteers or something.
  
• If it says JMdict, then it is referring to sentences that you could have found on Jisho.org, which uses that dictionary. In other words, you could be using the more English-friendly Jisho.org to find that sentence.
  
• The numbers next to each dictionary indicate how many example sentences there are for that dictionary.

So, based on all of that information, this is my favorite dictionary for example sentences: 研究社 新和英中辞典 ( ken-kyuu-sha shin-waei-chuu-ji-ten). I like this dictionary, because:

1. It's made by Kenkyusha, which is a reliable source.
2. 和英 (waei) is in the title, so I know that the sentences started out as Japanese.

On a side note, when going through example sentences, especially if you're planning to make flashcards with them (which I'll talk about a lot later in this guide), I'd try to avoid anything that sounds like a proverb, because chances are that no one is saying it in Japanese.

For example, in the results for けんか, I came across 金持ちけんかせず / kanemochi kenka sezu, which is translated to “A rich man never quarrels." Maybe I think that sounds cool. So I plan to use it the next time I'm with my Japanese friends, so they can all stand in awe of my J-skills. Only, they've probably never heard that phrase before. Bummer, right? If only all proverbs were also clichés, then you could go spouting off all of those.

On the other hand, a Japanese person would definitely understand the meaning of that proverb. So maybe if you said it with enough confidence and style, you might be able to get away with it. If you're more like me, though, and you stumble through it like a fool, then they're probably going to frown at you and be like, “No one says that."

And now your ancestors are shamed.

Considering a Denshi Jisho

I'm a sucker, because about five years ago I bought one of those electronic dictionaries (電子辞書 / denshi jisho) that you will see Japanese people carrying around all of the time. Everyone at school was like, “You should get one of those things, man. They're awesome. Your Japanese will be super-powered within like three minutes of buying one."

So, yeah, I fell for it, and I bought one of these:

Yeah, those are cool, because they have huge databases of words, example sentences, and all of that good stuff. I even saw one that pointed out intonation of Japanese words, which is super awesome (and hard to find). However, at the end of the day, they are simply not worth the money.

Reasons they are not worth the money:

• If you have a smartphone, then a good dictionary application (I'll introduce some later on) should be more than enough for your study needs.
  
• Denshi jisho are not good for looking up kanji. It's a mess, honestly, because these are designed to be used by Japanese people… and Japanese people have weird-o messed up ways of looking up kanji, yeah?
  
• Even if you absolutely MUST have a legitimate denshi jisho, then it is way cheaper and more effective to make your own. I have my own on my computer, which I made following some of the advice that I saw on JapaneseLanguageTools.com, coupled with some articles that I read in Japanese. I don't use it all that often, but sometimes (okay, almost never) it comes in handy when I'm translating.
  
• You can even put your own customized denshi jisho onto your own portable device. Instructions for this can also be found at JapaneseLangaugeTools.com. He charges some money to help you set that stuff up. But it's all pretty reasonable. I've never tried it personally.

How To Look Up Natural Phrasing of Words

It's so hard to find natural phrasing for new Japanese words. Above, I explained one tactic for doing this using Weblio. There are a couple of other options, too, though…

Ameblo ( http://ameblo.jp/) is a Japanese blogging site. Kind of like tumblr or Blogspot, I suppose… only it's populated by a bunch of Japanese people (and celebrities)! Here's the homepage:

Maybe you're thinking, uh, who cares, man? And I get that. But the reason that Ameblo is awesome for us Japanese nerds is that you can search the content of all of its blogs for words that you're trying to learn.

See that search box in the upper right corner? Well, we can put a word that we're trying to learn in there:

We can also go straight to the Search page at search.ameba.jp:

We hit “Search" (検索 / kensaku) and, Boom! Japanese goodness:

See where my cursor is on that screenshot? It's showing that there are 117,000 results! What?! So, I can scroll through these results a bit. We're diving into 100% Japanese here, so some of you might want to wait until you reach an intermediate or upper-intermediate level before you fry your brain with all that squiggly stuff.

Just looking at a few of the blog entries that come up on the first page, I get to see a bunch of different uses of 喧嘩 ( kenka). Here's my favorite:

Anyways, I appear to have gotten sidetracked. The point I'm trying to make is that looking for natural phrasing of Japanese words doesn't have to be painful. In fact, it can be quite entertaining and enjoyable. And enjoying ourselves is a huge part of sticking it out for this long journey, right?

Also, don't fret if you think looking through blogs is way beyond your Japanese level right now. I remember when I first discovered Ameblo, it melted my brain every time I looked at it. Now, I can actually read it and enjoy it. And I haven't really been studying for all that long. Also, I'm not any more capable than you are. Be patient. Keep swimming.

Using Lang-8

Some of you may already know Lang-8.com, as the site appears to have increased in popularity a lot in the last few years. It's kind of like blogging meets language exchange. The concept is explained quite clearly on their homepage:

1. You write a blog post in Japanese.
2. A Japanese person corrects your mistakes.
3. You return the favor by correcting the mistakes of other people.

It's a really cool concept, and it's great to see that people studying languages are so eager to help one another. It might seem kind of strange that I'm putting this in the reference section, but I think that one of the best ways to learn natural phrasing of Japanese is to make mistakes in Japanese, then get corrected.

One extra awesome thing about Lang-8 is that there is a hugely disproportionate number of Japanese people using it. In other words, it is highly likely that you're going to get rad corrections, like this:

To be perfectly honest, I've never used this site myself. By the time that I learned about its existence, I already had a pretty awesome network of Japanese friends and teachers that were helping to improve my atrocious mistakes. But here's what one reader told me about it:

Sounds pretty sweet to me.

Using Language Exchanges

Later on (in the Speaking Prep section), I'm going to go into quite a bit of detail about language exchange partners. So, once you get one, you could just ask them to use any word in a sentence for you.