骨を休め – literally “rest one’s bones,” take a physical rest

羽を伸ばす – literally “spread one’s wings,” a similar pattern but also includes a mental rest aspect, and another alternative is…

鬼の居ぬ間に洗濯をする – literally “do laundry while the oni is away,” where oni = unpleasant boss-like person/situation that oppresses you

Get the scoop on these and other idioms at this awesome ことわざ dictionary.

Enter Yahoo 辞書. This is a little trick that I picked up at work. Many of the Japanese people in the translation department (who basically play the mirror image of my role, i.e. E-J) use this, and occasionally they’ve sent me links from entries when I ask a question about a Japanese word.

Lots of great things about the dictionary. First of all, it’s digital, which means I only need to move my ten digits. Second, it has a clean layout with simple, easy to read definitions. If you’ve wanted to start using Japanese dictionaries but have been worried that you won’t understand the definitions, this is a great dictionary to start with.

Take for example the word 彷徨う. Plug it into the dictionary and you’ll see immediately that the reading is さまよう. Alternate kanji are さ迷う (which already provides a partial definition). There is a bit of the madness (［動ワ五（ハ四）］), of which I only recognize the 動 as a verb marker and 五 as a 五段動詞 (although I can’t recall the specifics of what that means), but it soon gives way to the clean cut definitions presented in an easy-to-read layout: 1 – 迷って歩きまわる, 2 – あちこち動く, 3 – 判断に迷う. I love it.

They occasionally provide examples of usage from great works of literature such as, in this case, The Tale of Genji…not that I understand them, but still a cool feature. You can also click on the tabs to access the thesaurus (類語) or J-E (和英) dictionaries for the word. Great dictionary. Just need to train myself to use it more often.

(Don’t forget to check out this past entry about how to read from context and use Japanese dictionaries.)

I would be remiss if I didn’t provide this link (via Wikipedia) to Tom Gally’s writings. He worked on the fifth edition of the dictionary. You can read specifically about the dictionary here, here, here and here.

The fourth edition of Eijirō was released in September of this year, and as far as I know it is the first version to support Mac OS.

It’s only 2500 yen, and you should be able to find it at a bookstore or a computer store.

After a quick installation, it loads up in a tiny little screen.

The color scheme and layout will be familiar if you’ve used the online version.

This is a great piece of software, and I highly recommend picking it up. It’s faster than the online version, of course, and you can access it offline. It also boasts 1,660,000 entries, which I believe is more than the online version.
 

Anyone recognize the image? If you were thinking Wikipedia, you are correct. While online dictionaries such as ALC are handy, as are electronic dictionaries and even paper dictionaries, Wikipedia is more precise. Find what you want in English and then pray that it has an equivalent entry in Japanese. Not only do you get the word itself, you get a whole page full of Japanese explaining the history of the thing and, if that thing happens to be athlete’s foot, how to get rid of the thing. That adds up to a lot of practice reading and a huge bump in your vocabulary. Reading one medium-to-long Wikipedia entry per day would be a really effective study strategy.

Apparently athlete’s foot is 足白癬 (あしはくせん) in Japanese, although for some reason that won’t 変換 properly. That might be because the vernacular is 水虫 (みずむし) – water bug. Damn that rainy season and this never-ending summer. I’ll be making a trip to Matsumoto Kiyoshi today.