Customer Reviews

The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary

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4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(4)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm not sure why I took so long to write a review for this dictionary ... I've been using the Kanji Learner's Dictionary for almost three years now and have nothing but good things to say about it. The best thing about this dictionary is its size. All of the commonly used kanji and kanji compounds are included in a compact volume. When you're reading a newspaper article and come across an unfamiliar kanji/compound, or when you're writing a letter (or homework, etc.) and you can visualize a character but can't quite remember how it's written, who wants to lug out some 100 pound (slight exaggeration) kanji dictionary when you can quickly leaf through this one?

Granted, once you get out of the beginning stages, you will need a more thorough dictionary. But I have found myself going back to this one every single time, unless there's a character or compound that doesn't appear in it (but honestly, I would say that happens only 1-5% of the time). It's that convenient.

If you are looking for your first kanji dictionary, definitely buy this one- you'll find yourself going back to it again and again. If you only have a huge kanji dictionary, buy this one too- you'll love the size, and be surprised by the fact that this dictionary actually has the vast majority of kanji/compounds that you're looking for ...

I cannot recommend this dictionary highly enough. There is simply no better dictionary for beginning and intermediate students, and it can be used even into advanced studies. I will be taking the Japanese Proficiency test for 2 kyu soon, which requires reading over 1,200 kanji, and I still use this dictionary. If it had been published when I first began my Japanese study, I might be making plans to take the 1 kyu test instead of 2 kyu. It's that good.

When I came to Japan, I inherited three kanji dictionaries from various sources, and they were all basically useless, even though I had already studied Japanese off and on for a total of about a year's worth of university-level coursework. I went shopping for a new dictionary a few months after getting here, and thankfully I found the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary, which had just been published a short time before.

The SKIP lookup system makes so much sense that I wonder why no one had ever thought of it before. While it does take a small amount of practice to become completely proficient in using SKIP, the traditional indexing by radical is so cumbersome that you often have to fall back on the possible readings (on-yomi or kun-yomi) for a character to find the right entry. If you are trying to find a totally unfamiliar kanji, whose reading you don't know, this is completely hopeless.

The Kanji Learner's dictionary also includes a radical index for those who learned the traditional system, or for the very few cases where looking things up by radical is faster or easier. In other dictionaries, main indexing is _only_ by radical. This is a problem since many modern kanji have been simplified so much that the original radical it is traditionally indexed under has been simplified out of existence. That was something I didn't know until I had already been studying Japanese for over a year. After looking for one character ("au," to meet) for almost 5 minutes, I had to ask my teacher where it was indexed in the class dictionary.

My test for which dictionary to buy was actually to see how easy it would be for someone with no prior knowledge to find the kanji for "au." Most dictionaries (and my teacher) list it under the radical entry for sun, which is no longer present in the modern form of the character. If you didn't already know about the "lost" radical you wouldn't be able to find it at all by using a traditional index, and if you already know that much about the kanji, you don't really need a dictionary to look it up!

The entries in the Kanji Learner's Dictionary include the most commonly-used compounds, grouped by reading, and unlike almost every other dictionary I've seen so far, it includes words that do not use the entry kanji in the front position. The compound words include many technical terms and words that are often used in publications, but often are hard to find in anything other than a massively exhaustive word dictionary. The possible readings (yomi) are written in roman letters (romaji). Though some may say this is not a good thing, in that kana is ultimately more useful for learning to read Japanese, I think it should not be necessary for a student to have to learn all of the kana before starting to learn kanji.

The frequency of use ranking has been absolutely invaluable in furthering my studies. Some of the kanji introduced in the first six years of elementary school as dictated by the Ministry of Education don't even make the top 1,000 most used. Instead of using the Japanese education standards, I used the frequency table compiled for this dictionary. It made an immediate difference in how well I was able to pick up new kanji since the ones I was studying first were the ones I was most likely to see in newspapers and other publications.

The only downside to this dictionary is that it is somewhat limited for advanced studies. With entries for only 2,230 kanji, you sometimes cannot find an entry for some less common characters. Of course, once you progress to the point where you find a need to look up kanji that are not included in this dictionary, you can graduate to its big brother, the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary, which is the only other kanji dictionary I would recommend.

If you are a beginning through advanced-intermediate student of Japanese, buy this dictionary now! Save yourself the pain of struggling to learn a primitive and outmoded indexing system that requires knowledge of the characters that you are obviously still trying to acquire. Every minute you spend unsuccessfully looking for a character is a minute you could be studying instead. This dictionary will save you weeks worth of those wasted minutes and will give you the tools to intelligently study Japanese characters.

By the time you learn enough Japanese to require using a traditionally indexed dictionary, you will know enough about kanji to use that dictionary with the minimum of pain, though I guarantee you will miss being able to look up complicated kanji using the SKIP method. People who say otherwise are geniuses, total Japaniphiles who love everything Japanese regardless of how unnecessarily difficult some of their traditional ways of doing things can be, or those who invested massive amounts of time and effort in learning the "traditional" way and are jealous of the fact that this revolutionary dictionary only came out a couple of years ago.

This is so well-designed, it is a joy to use.

(I'm in my second year of learning Japanese [Japanese for Busy People series], first term of real attention to Kanji.)

The SKIP system is just one of five ways of looking up kanji; I've used them all now (even the frequency-ranking one). It's nice but just one facet of the dictionary.

"Little things" like the layout, the indices, the introductory explanations, the paper, the font, the size are all so good that one doesn't even really notice them, they just seem natural, like a good tool should be. Now other dictionaries (like the complete Nelson which I have and respect and still use when necessary) seem awkward, if not ugly.

The keywords in red and the organization of the definitions really do help give (to this novice anyway) a feel for the core meanings.

Plus, for computer use, the Unicode numbers are given which is a big time-saver (for me anyway).

It's hard to imagine a more perfectly balanced kanji dictionary for the beginner.

This book is nearly perfect. It's very complete and comes in a very handy presentation. You can quickly find the 2000 most used kanjis and learn how to write them correctly. Besides a kanji's core meaning, you learn frequent combinations with other kanjis, which helps a lot for context interpretation. The layout invites you to read on, even after you found what you wanted, it's beautiful! My fear to kanjis is gone. I learnt to break them down in pieces and now I remember them easier. I just wish that this dictionary had kana instead of romaji in the meanings part. There's also a lot of "wrongly-counted" kanjis (for those of us who still don't master the SKIP system) that somehow ruin the layout, although is very considerate and helpful from the editor to give us a shorcut instead of going like "you have to learn how to count strokes first before using this dictionary"! For those of you who find this book incomplete, I tell you, you can always go to its daddy, Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Character Dictionary. Let's learn kanji!

I find this dictionary helpful, as a beginner. It is quite easy to use, and the definitions are clear. My few nitpicking problems with the dictionary are: (1) I'm actually not a big fan of the "skip" system; while it is easy to use initially, I think that in the long run it is probably better to practice looking for radicals or counting strokes, so you can use other dictionaries. (2) Many kanji and compounds are missing (this is true of any small, or beginners', dictionary, though. (3) I wish that the readings were given in kana. As nearly all English kanji dictionaries give readings in romaji, I suspect that I am in a small minority here, though.

Overall, a good dictionary for beginners (like me). You will certainly want a more comprehensive dictionary if you keep studying Japanese, though.

In general, I can't really say anything too bad about this dictionary. I originally began my kanji studies with Kanji & Kana by Spahn and Hadamitzky. After about 200 or so kanji with that book, I decided to purchase this book because it would provide another source for learning kanji, and possibly some more insight. With this book, I was able to learn the rest of the Joyo kanji within about a year and a half. I still think this dictionary is a great study tool, but I have increasingly become more critical of some of its features.

First of all, some reviewers knock this dictionary because it only offers romaji lookup for the entries. While this is true, it is also true of almost all other kanji study books designed for non-native Japanese speakers. Given that, I can overlook that fault in this dictionary. If you could read and understand the interpretations of the characters in a Japanese dictionary, you wouldn't need this book in the first place!

This dictionary does seem to boast of the SKIP lookup system. I originally was very excited about this system because it was relatively new, and I thought it would somehow make the lookup easier. The lookup process is most certainly easier for 'type 1' kanji (kanji which can be separated into right and left sections). However, for the other types of kanji, types two, three, and four, lookup can be surprisingly ambiguous. On occasion, it has taken me up to three times to lookup the kanji I was after. As a result, I have become frustrated to the point where now I almost exclusively use the On-Kun-yomi for the lookup. I would prefer the SKIP system to be replaced by a nice radical lookup system. While this book does have a radical system, it is not very accessible because the book is basically organized according to the SKIP system.

In addition, many times this dictionary gives definitions that are unnecessary. For example, one of the definitions given to the kanji 流 (flow or current) is 'electric current.' One of the vocabulary listed under this definition is 電流, electric current. The meaning of this vocabulary clearly comes from 電, which carries the meaning of 'electricity,' and without this kanji, the idea of 'electric current' would not be implied. There are MANY examples of this throughout the book, and sometimes they are more troubling. When I learn new kanji, I like to learn as few meanings as possible so that I can focus on a general basic meaning. This dictionary does claim to focus on a 'central meaning' for each kanji, but sometimes the definition unmistakably belongs to the other kanji.

My favorite feature of this dictionary is the amount of vocabulary given under each kanji. This is very helpful for aqcuiring a larger vocabulary in comparison with a lot of other kanji learner dictionaries. In general, I would recommend this book to anyone desiring to learn kanji. Just be aware of some of the things I mentioned earlier!

Tracking found kanji compounds is still not always the quickest thing to do (I can still mis-count numbers of strokes, etc.,) but with some patience it is possible with this dictionary to find virtually any kanji you set out hunting for. And when you find it, that's where the real value is--core meanings, rankings according to frequency of use, stroke order diagrams, and most of all a wack of compounds containing the kanji in question, regardless of where it appears in the compound. You're sure to feel empowered in your running battle with the outrageous number of kanji to be reckoned with in this nutty language. Gotta love it.

I recently received the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary and I must say that I had my expectations fully met. Not only because it was all I had read about, but the edition was excellent, the size just perfect to carry around and the design is the main feature of the dictionary.
I had seen about 20 diferent dictionaries and I finally decided for this one (I must say that this is my first year with the language so that was a very important reason).
Let me tell you this straight: the book is for a basic-intermediate level (and it is designed as a pedagogic tool) so if you are a rookie or don't get well with the kanji, this book is for you. But if you know a considerable amount of kanji forget it, it only has 2230 so you better look for the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary, wich it's also got th SKIP, core meaning, stroke orders, etc, but is not so aimed to the learning.
Finally, the forget about the Nelson-like mamut dictionaries, the kosansha's editions are very superior (not in quantity of kanji but in quality, organization and in-deph.

First of all, I should say that this is a great dictionary overall, and it's so well designed that I have fun just flipping through it. The compound-words provided in the entries are often surprisingly advanced, and as long as you know hiragana anyway, the romaji -on and -kun readings aren't really much of a detraction (I mean, really, who cares? a sound is a sound).

However, there is one small problem with it. One of the selling points of this dictionary is that the SKIP system is supposedly easier to use than the radical system used in more advanced dictionaries, and for all I know it may very well be, but it's not as easy to use as the ad copy would have you believe. Once you FIND the entry for the Kanji you need, you're in business, but figuring out which category your chosen Kanji belongs to can be surprisingly difficult. Basically, the SKIP system is arbitrary, and it really only becomes easy to use after you've been using it for quite some time. This dictionary boasts 5 unique look-up methods, and it's a good thing because you'll often find yourself getting frustrated with the SKIP system and defaulting to the ON-KUN index.

Overall this is a useful tool for the beginning/intermediate student, however don't be fooled into thinking that it's going to be increadibly easy to use. Like the Japanese language itself, learning the ins and outs of SKIP takes time and practice. Still recommended.

This is a great selection for a learner. I have been studying Japanese for a very short time, and it is quite difficult to read a newspaper, letter, or anything other than children's books (due to the large number of kanji symbols found in normal text.) As a beginner, the most useful tool in this book is five pages of the most commonly used kanji symbols used in Japanese text. 2000 kanji symbols, ranked by frequency of use, are listed in an easy to use table. This table references the location of detailed kanji information.

Subsequent investigation of the symbol will show the exact method of handwriting the symbol. The book goes into advanced knowledge (which I have yet to actually use) that the more advanced student will appreciate.

This book is truly a useful tool for beginners as well as the more advanced person. I was told by my Japanese tutor that this book is the most complete American version of a Japanese kanji dictionary she had ever seen.