[blip @ Dec 28th 2005 5:38AM]

OddManOut: You are totally right.



ENGADGET CREW:

There is *nothing* as good as a *dedicated* electronic dictionary. PDA:s are *crap* compared to these. The only thing I gather from your news post is that none of you have ever studied a language like japanese or chinese. When or if you ever do, you will soon realize that an electronic dictionary is second to none when it comes to looking up words, characters and sentence patterns. The problem might be to find and choose the right one which has relevant dictionaries of *good* quality but then again most of the electronic dictionaries are of good quality as long as they are $200-300.



PDA:s have a very limited library of dictionaries and most of them just plainly suck - due to limited contents and/or input problems. Believe me, I have tried - hard enough. Nothing beats keyboard typing for quick input even if a stylus input could be nice for kanji every now and then (there are some chinese-jap-eng ones that have this and it seems to be getting more popular just in the last few months). That said, though, it usually takes a couple of seconds if you know your "kanji-theory".



Don't post about things you know nothing about. Without my dictionary I'd have to pack jap-eng, eng-jap, kanji and classical japanese dictionaries for my studies. No joke, I and many other students in east-asian languages *need* those 3-4kg of books worth (not taking the volume into account) for our everyday studies. Sure there are positives with a regular paper dicitionary as well but when you are given a text you have never seen before on a subject you might not have even heard about it will be a test of your nerves and patience. Having a electronic dictionary is a pain reliever, to both your head and back. There is noone in my current class (japanese language fulltime studies, third year) who do not own an electronic dictionary. It's a necessity.



So please, keep posting about electronic dictionaries but stop slandering them every time. It's like me saying doctors are crap because I have never been ill (now *that* was a lie).



Now, about that mp3-player... I guess as long as it doesn't drain the batteries in one sitting... Batteries usually hold for more than a month in a plain electronic dictionary.