Breaking the Repetitive Word Cycle with a Japanese Thesaurus
Daily flash card reviews have a way of reinforcing the same language over and over into your head. This is good. It’s how you remember. But sometimes this can have the side effect of certain words being your “go to” words when trying to express yourself. While there is nothing wrong with saying 食べる, おいしい, and すごい at every possible moment, you may want to expand. There are some useful tools to help you out.
The word you need to know to start is 類語 (synonym/related word) and what you are looking for is a powerful online Japanese Thesaurus. There are two big names, and one smaller one which you probably have never heard of (but should look at).
In each of the thesauruses, I’m going to do a search for the word 食べる to show you what information each one provides.
1. Goo Thesaurus
The Goo thesaurus, which is also part of the dictionary I recommend on Jalup, is incredibly in-depth and offers some unique features like usage comparison charts.
There are also easy to view synonym charts that are fully clickable, bringing up the definition for every synonym word.
The one thing I don’t like is the English definition stuffed right in the middle of everything. This can be a pain if you are already in J-J.
2. Weblio Thesaurus
Weblio is probably one of the fastest growing Dictionaries/Thesauruses, and with this, you’ll almost always find what you are searching for.
While it excels in breadth, it falters in depth. There’s just not that much per entry. While it has clickable definitions, these clicks only bring you to other thesaurus entries, and not the definitions themselves.
3. Tamatebako Thesaurus
Tamatebako is a much smaller and less refined site compared to the two giants above. It doesn’t even have links on the words.
What I love about it is its creativity. It splits up the synonyms into special categories in a way the other two do not. For example, for 食べる, the synonyms are broken down into:
- Woman/Ill person Eating
- Man/Student Eating
- Eating deliciously/Eating with bad manners
- Family/Group Eating
- Animal/Humans eating
Sometimes I like to just browse when I’m writing in Japanese to let my imagination run wild with new phrases. However, it can be frustrating to run into “no search results found” more often than not.
Your Favorite Thesaurus
Have you used any of the above three? Which do you like? Or do you have another big one to add to this list?
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
I have a question, not really related to this post.
I do my daily flash cards. Great! Zap! Zap! But I get the impression that most of the words I can remember in the context of the flashcards, I’ll recognize them when I see or hear them in context, but recalling them when writing or in conversation doesn’t seem to happen, partly because a lot of them I don’t see again outside of the original source. So I stick with 食べる、おいし and すごい :)
I suppose that means I just have to read more and watch more telly but do you have a hint for a more efficient way of making them accessible in conversation?
That’s completely natural for your output ability (writing/converseation) to lag behind your input ability (reading/listening). It just takes more time for passive knowledge to get transferred to your active knowledge. But it will happen :) Adding in more listening immersion outside of flashcards speeds up the process.
And there is nothing wrong with sticking with 食べる、おいしい and すごい. Japanese people use them all the time, nonstop. This article is more for people who purposefully want to expand their vocabulary a bit.
Never knew about the Goo thesaurus! Now Goo is even better :)
Goo is always full of surprises haha.