this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
85 points (95.7% liked)
Technology
66783 readers
4878 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They were a bigger deal. I started learning Japanese when the first Iphone came out and spent quite some time in Japan when the Android phones were a new thing. Internet on the phones was very limited.
Dictionaries existed on the phones, but the usability was non-existent. Even worse if you had to look for a word you didn't know how to read.
The electronic dictionaries had great writing detection and cross-referencing between language and informational dictionaries etc. At the time they were awesome. One electronic dictionary could contain dozens of dictionaries of various topics, which probably was convenient for Japanese themselves (and not just language learners).
Of course nowadays you can do the same on a phone, but there was a period when you couldn't.