I just suggested to add a link between 満足 and 不満 as opposites. What do you think? I usually add these kinds of relationships between words in a private "usage" window, but I believe it'd come in handy for the users if it was the norm to have these sort of references.
Could you add the feature to link a word containing the sound/letters, because i mainly use this feature to add words to learning tasks that don't give an example for the use, like:
ひゅ (=hyu) - ひゅう (=hyuu {the onomatopeia for whistling wind or whistling sounds})
にょ (=nyo) - にょう (=nyou {urin})
which are already part of the renshuu dictionary but not examples for the learning of the hiragana.
You are free to add these for yourself as private usage notes, but given the low and limited number of "words" that could take advantage of this, I do not think I'll be adding it as an official option. Thank you so much for the suggestion, though!
3. I do not plan on adding synonyms at the moment - I do not feel that would be particularly useful without being able to also attach info on how they are similar, and how they are different. Otherwise, I could see (just picking out an example) each word that means "production" having 5-6 different "synonyms" (or near-synonyms).
I definitely think adding synonym would be the most useful feature in all of these. It would help a lot! Every time I have wanted to use this feature, it was to add a synonym of a word that I knew well! It gives a reference in Japanese instead of having the need to have to translate everything in English. I believe that if you can study Japanese without resorting to translation, it just helps you learn faster.
It's simply not a good fit for this system. Synonyms need specific information that says "Here is how these are similar, and here is how they are different."
Instead, using Usage notes for this is perfect, and there are a number of users who already add notes like this. They get linked to all the related words, and I plan to (in the future) have a way to extract the terms out of these comparison notes and make it easier to get to them without looking down into the notes.
Having just a list of "Synonyms: A, B, C, D" without specific info about each one is not going to be as helpful as I'd like, though.
The existing implementation is less than ideal for synonyms because synonyms don’t come in pairs. Generally you also want an explanation of when to use which one, because there’s often subtle differences. Many people have been creating word notes for synonyms, which is seems to work well despite being unstructured. I suppose it might be useful to have a wizard of some kind for synonym word notes, but I don’t know what it would look like.
Several other dictionaries use WordNet for synonyms. Any thoughts on incorporating that into renshuu?
Wordnet is an absolute mess - using it for mechanically pulling out associations between words is perilous at best. I do not have the time to go into details, but everything I've seen when doing deep dives into it has shown that it would require manual verification on everything, and that's not something I can dump on top of all other verification activities within renshuu.
