Fun with Google

As I've said, my Spanish dictionary isn't exactly all that. But I don't really have the cash for a new one, and I can compensate pretty well thanks to the internet.

My absolute favorite trick is image searches. If you're trying to look up any kind of concrete noun, then you can simply do an image search on it and see what comes up. One of the recipes in "Como Agua Para Chocolate" included "pithaya," which I couldn't find in my dictionary. Turns out I couldn't find it because it's more commonly spelled pitaya. But when I looked up pithaya, I found enough images to figure out the definition: a dragon fruit.

For anything that can't be clearly defined in an image, I try to do phrasal searches on things like "X means" or "X is," in English or in the target language; the most common identifier-phrase in Japanese is とは, and that tends to get me pretty good results.

One more trick with Google... the "do native speakers say it this way?" test. There's such a wide corpus of text out there on the internet that if you enter a small piece of a sentence, and it's grammatical and not absolutely outlandish ("colorless green ideas sleep furiously"), it's likely that it'll turn up. On the other hand, if it does turn up, it doesn't mean for sure that it's grammatical. It may work only in a specific context. But it does give me confidence to use sentence forms that I might otherwise feel anxious about using.