I bought one of the electronic dictionaries that so many English-speaking Japanese use. (For those interested, the one I bought is the Canon Wordtank V90.) While very useful for many of its features, which include animated stroke order of kanji and handwriting recognition of characters, it’s not as useful to me as to a native Japanese speaker since it’s English-Japanese dictionary has the explanations of English and Japanese words in Japanese, and in full kanji-mode at that. As my Japanese improves (and particularly as my knowledge of kanji gets broader) it will become more useful.

Today I was looking something up and got the “neighbouring word” distraction. The Japanese word “kakuka” was listed with English meanings of “drupe” and “stone fruit”. I’d never come across the word “drupe” before and it wasn’t in the English-English dictionary in the V90. Wikipedia to the rescue, though, and it turns out just to be a technical biology term for a fruit with a stone-like seed at the centre.