Customer Reviews

The Kanji Dictionary (English and Japanese Edition)

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've studied Japanese for 5 or so years now, and bought "The Kanji Dictionary" after I began to outgrow my first, smaller kanji dictionary. Even though I consider myself an advanced learner of Japanese, I have not felt the need to buy a "Japanese" Kanji dictionary yet: this one by Spahn and Hadamitzky has more than met my needs. Here are some of this dictionary's plusses:

-Just about every kanji or kanji compound you can think of is included (they claim 47,000+ compounds which sounds about right).

-The look-up system is easy to use, and the index is similarly helpful

-The appendices are surprisingly interesting and informative, including information ranging from the reigns of the emperors to geography to even a list of the most frequent Japanese surnames.

My only possible complaints are:

-not enough radicals: they chose to categorize the kanji using 79 radicals instead of the 214 historical radicals. This resulted in almost 300 kanji that are "without" a radical, all lumped together at the beginning of the dictionary by the number of strokes. Many of these are very common kanji, which can cause frustrations if you're trying to figure out which radical to look up only to find that it's in the "no radical" section.

-it would have been great if they'd had accent markings to show how the characters are pronounced. In Japanese, context and an accent shift are the only difference between saying "Let's have success!" and "Let's have sex!" (sex and success are both romanized "seikoo"). Native Japanese presumably know the difference in pronunciation, but learners of a second language are not as likely. This can result in awkward situations. Knowing the correct accent in general makes you much more understandable, and it is a shame that most dictionaries don't include this information.

Overall though, this is a great dictionary. I highly recommend it for beginners, experts, and everyone in between!

I bought this dictionary just when I was beginning my fourth semester of japanese lessons, to help me with my future translations and with the learning of new kanji (which is always a useful thing, since many tend to get disappointed when they know they have to learn about 2,000 to read the newspaper).

I have always thought that with any given dictionary, there are two main issues you have to keep in mind: how complete it is, and just how easy it is to use.

I have not as of yet searched for any kanji I have not been able to find, so I'd say it is fairly complete. This is an extremely thorough dictionary, covering not only an incredible amount of individual kanji, but a whole lot of compunds (the dictionary claims over 47,000. I'll take their word.), so there is a very good possibility of you too finding the character you are looking for.

As for the second issue, I must say I'm surprised at how easy it is to find kanji. When i first heard of the system kanji dictionaries used for listing them, I was appalled. I was pleased to find, nevertheless, a full two-page-and-a-half brief manual on how to use the dictionary that gave me all the preparation I needed: I was succesfully looking up kanji in now more than 10 minutes.

Basically, there are two ways in which you can find a given kanji in this dictionary: by their readings (either the on-yomi, or the kun-yomi), and by their stroke count. The 79-radical system can be a little confusing at first, but is fairly simple to get used and not at all as illogical as one might think.

The only complaint I have so far is the lack of internal references made in the dictionary. For instance, one of the appendices lists the 1006 "gakushuu kanji" (the kanji taught in elementary school), but their are numbered straight from 1 to 1006, without the reference to the dictionary entry for each of those kanji. The same thing happens to the kanji in "the 100 most frequent kanji", "the most frequent kanji used in family names", "the 284 extra kanji for use in given names", etc. Adding that would be a real time saver if you are planning, as I am, in using the dictionary as a learning tool.

Still, it's a great tool, and I'm really convinced that this was one of my truly great buys. Definitively 5 stars.

I have used many Japanese dictionaries over the years, and this is by far the single most useful one for kanji. This is largely because many kanji that are frequently-used don't often occur at the beginning of a compound. So to get a picture of the usage of one of these, you need a dictionary that gives lists of compounds with the kanji in positions other than first. This is the only dictionary to do that.

This has been my primary Kanji Dictionary for several years. It is impressively comprehensive, covering over 7,500 single kanji characters (compare this to the Japanese Ministry of Education's list of 1850 "standard" Kanji) and almost 47,000 multi-character compounds. The dictionary itself is about 1700 pages. Unlike "Japanese-English" dictionaries which are ordered according to the Hiragana/Katakana (alphabet) sequence, this is a Kanji dictionary and thus is based primarily on ideogram (kanji) construct. Since a single kanji character can have a wide breadth of pronunciations given the context, strokes or stroke composites hold the key to unlocking the kanji universe. Greater minds have determined that all Kanji characters are (nearly) comprised of 79 "radicals". Using the analogy of chemistry, if a Kanji character were the chemical compound, the list of 79 "radicals" is the periodic table representing the core components from which the entire system is built. Thus once you become familiar with the 79 radicals, the massive world of Kanji becomes all that less intimidating.

In 15 years of professional translation work, I have found no kanji dictionary better than this. Far superior to the Nelson reader. Radicals are organized according to logic, not tradition. This is the only kanji dictionary a serious translator requires.

I checked this book out of my local library, and kept renewing it until I couldn't renew it anymore. understanding how to look the kanji up is a little confusing at first, since the method is completly different from english dictionaries. instead of looking up kanji phonetically, you look the characters up by the base strokes used to create them. I have to admit, the first thing i started to translate was not from a textbook. it was a doujinshi, or japanese fan comic. i was able to find almost all of the kanji i looked for. it is a very comprehensive list of all the kanji you're likely to encounter. i highly recommend it to help you in translations and so forth. a drawback to this book is its size though. it's gargantuan. unless you have a very strong back or are slightly masochistic this is a reference book for home use only. it is also time consuming to search through all the entries to find the kanji you need to know. despite that, this is still a great kanji dictionary.

when I did an internet search to locate this, I found a number of negative reviews. Basically the consensus seemed to be that the character lookup system is new and therefore bad.

I disagree. The system the authors developed is the first "rational" approach in that it does not require that you know what the important radical is in order to look up a kanji. Morever, the ability to look up compounds using any character in the compound is very useful.

However, there are some negatives:
(1) the authors are not entirely consistent within their own approach.
E.g., the characters under the radical for hand are grouped under the three character radical, which is the way it is written except when it is written as a single character. However, the character for hand is written with four strokes, and you must know that in order to find it under the three stroke index.
this is the example that comes to mind most immediately, although I believe there are others.
(2) the binding is not of a very high quality. if you use this frequently (which you will), it will eventually break the spine.
i gave away my first version after it split in two. my current version is in four pieces.

on the positive side: this is so extremely useful that I am going to order a third copy.

HIGHLY RECOMENDED.

I'd used a Kanji dictionary twice in my life before buying this, but I had to do a few translations and after playing with this book, there was no looking back.

To be fair, I don't read Japanese fluently, nor do I speak Japanese fluently, far from it. However, when you need to translate a Japanese name or two, kanji will always come up. From me personally, it's for karate history.

I find this book excellent, especially when compared to the others of its type, especially when it comes to numbering the kanji. The indices into the kanji characters are intelligent, that is, they contain information about the kanji itself. As an example, character SHIN, meaning "mind", "soul" has the index 4e5.1: 4 strokes for the radical (radical 4e), 5 strokes for the rest of the character. The Nelson just numbers sequentially and for the same character, you have #3245. This isn't to say that the Nelson is bad, but I feel that this dictionary is better thought out and more useful.

I'm studying japanese for about 9 years and this dictionary has the kanji compounds that we need. The others dictionary has few compounds and know only the means of two kanjis alone isn't enough to understand the real mean of a compound, for example, the kanji �� (akai) means red and the kanji �� (makoto) means truth, the compound �Ԑ� (makoto) means sincerity. If there was a CD version I'd rate it with 6 stars.

This kanji dictionary is fairly sufficient. About 80% of the kanji compounds I needed to look up are in there. As for the missing 20%, that means not every kanji compound is included...despite that, this dictionary is a useful tool for serious students of the Japanese language