When I encounter a new vocabulary word, it is often useful to see how that word is used in other contexts. Previously, I would use Jisho.org and do a sentence search for the word, but they really only have sentences from tatoeba.org, which are not always the most natural, and sometimes, there just aren’t very many. I’ve found yourei.jp to be significantly better, as they take example sentences from real books and display them in order of readability.
Compare (example word: 円満)
One disadvantage is that yourei.jp doesn’t provide English translations, so if you need those you might be better served elsewhere.
(For this particular example word I chose, weblio.jp seems to have decent results, but it overall seems to be hit-or-miss. For instance, ぼかす. Lots of sentences, but they’re all basically useless. Most seem to be excerpts from technical manuals.)
Nice write-up about yourei.jp. Yeah, I tended to use it more than weblio.jp as well.
For ficton-based sentences, I also like using massif.la since its pulling sentences from web novels on syosetsu.com. The only con since many of the stories are written by aspiring writers (ie. amateurs), there’s no guarantee everything is proofread and correct, but most of the time, it’s been fine.
I also find it helpful that these writers may overly rely on cliches and phrasing, as it’s better from a learner standpoint to see how a word is most commonly used. I’ll often see a word, especially a less common words, almost written verbatim in the same exact phrase by multiple authors. This can also help with learning collocations (common pairing of words) too.
Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary/新和英大辞典 is also really useful since it has so many example sentences per word, and it’s useful for getting a more nuanced feel for how a particular word is used.
For instance, ぼかす. Lots of sentences, but they’re all basically useless. Most seem to be excerpts from technical manuals.)
Funny that you mentioned ぼかす・暈す. While I have seen ぼかすused in fiction, the first few times I saw the word was actually in technical contexts, so that particular does appear in those situations quite often, like when I switched my phone to Japanese and used various camera apps. The very first time I saw the word was when playing a horror visual novel (沙耶の唄 / Saya no Uta). As soon as you start it up, it presents you with settings options screen, asking you the amount of blur you want to apply to the all violent imagery used in the game.
写真のふちをぼかしてみましょう。 クロテスクな画像はそのまま表示 クロテスクな画像のフォーカスを暈かす クロテスクな画像の明度を落としてフォーカスを暈かすI’ve never forgotten the word because of that.
But yeah I agree, when looking for example sentences, in general, I tend to skip over the technical sentences.