Japanese Light Novel Book Club discussion

I have a number of hardcopy dictionaries, but I was looking for the convenience of an online one. I found the cambridge one and it seems pretty good.

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dicti...

Any other recommendations?

I use longman but only as an English-English dictionary. When I want to translate Japanese into English, I just search the word or phrase with "English (英語)" in Japanese at google like, "よろしくお願いします　英語", "してみませんか　英語", "かかってこい　英語", etc. Then I find some website that explain how to translate the word.
Japanese and English are far different. Literal translation is usually not acceptable. So I need someone who explains.

I sometimes use jisho.org to find the meanings/pronunciation of kanji. I find it's very useful as you can search using English, romaji, kana, kanji and through radicals. I've also used an app for Android called Aedict3 and that works in a similar way. :)

I use jisho sometimes, and I think it's very good. I haven't seen a better 英和／和英 dictionary online. But another recommendation - some years ago I started using an iPhone dictionary app called "japanese" by a developer called renzo. It's based on the same open source JDict material as jisho, but it's very fast and the user interface is very nice. It has many different ways to search for kanji that you don't know, including by drawing them (though as usual you have to get the stroke count and order right). I paid $25 for it in 2011 and it was money well spent. I tried many different dictionaries at the time at it was by far the best. I don't know what it costs these days, but even at $25 I really recommend it for anyone learning japanese.

If you are japanese and looking for english words I think google is probably the best source, as Fanta suggests. The most important thing about getting a foreign language word right is having a sense of how the word is actually used in the target language, and I find that the best shortcut to that is having a few example sentences that include the word. Jisho and "japanese" both have example sentences for most common words, but for uncommon words I've found no substitute for just googling the word and looking at how it is used 'in the wild'.

James wrote: "I use jisho sometimes, and I think it's very good. I haven't seen a better 英和／和英 dictionary online. But another recommendation - some years ago I started using an iPhone dictionary app called "japa..."

Ok, Jisho looks like my go-to site.

Excellent! I downloaded Japanese (it's free now and hasn't been updated since 2014) and tried one word: murata and it found 群竹, which wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but then I tried "log" and it Returned 丸太 which is what I wanted. It's still good, though!

Good idea that you and Fanta have about googling to see the word used in the wild. ^_^

If you don't mind paying for it, Midori is a great app for your phone and it allows you to draw the kanji or look up by radicals. It comes in quite handy ^_^ I actually believe that it uses the same definitions as Jisho.