Customer Reviews

Kodansha's Basic English-Japanese Dictionary (Japanese for Busy People)

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

 

 

This is the English-Japanese dictionary I use the most. I own 10 dictionaries and grammer books on the Japanese language and am a beginning-intermediate level student of the language. This one, containing 1500 + pages of extremely helpful guidance on how to correctly use the most "basic" words, is by far the most helpful on a daily basis. Whether for sending e-mail to a Japanese friend or completing a homework assignment for a Japanese language class, this dictionary has no equals in its niche. While modestly claiming to be only a "basic" dictionary, it is much more than that. It is the only book I have found on the market which has taken the time and effort (which must have been considerable) to provide samples sentences in both English and romaji and hiragana/kanji for the many different meanings and applications of about 4,500 basic English words. This book is well worth the investment. I wish all language dictionaries were as helpful as this one.

Right now, I'm using the Pimsleur CDs in the car to learn Japanese. However, when I get home, I need to be able to write things down to remember them--so Ifm making a vocabulary list in a spreadsheet, and I also want to make flashcards.

One of tough things to get used to in Japanese is the complex writing system--how can I be sure that I'm writing things down correctly? Even if I only use Roomaji, I need to be sure Ifm writing out long vowels versus short correctly. If using real Japanese writing, how will I know if there is a Kanji involved... or if I have made a gspelling mistakeh?

Well, this dictionary is the best one I have found to help me write down all Ifm hearing on the Pimsleur CDs (and I have ordered quite a few). True, it does not have a lot of words in it--the preface says it has around 4,500 headwords. However, the real value is that it has many, many complete sentences for each entry along with usage notes. So whenever you look up an English word or concept, you can almost always find the utterance that youfre hearing so you can see how to write it down, and another way to use it. (This is especially useful to see concrete examples of conjugated verbs and conjugated adjectives.) It also shows variants of the same idea...and how the variants are acceptable in some constructions but not others.

For instance, if you look up the word "fine," you can find the following example of usage:

No, this is fine.
,¢,¢,¦A,±,ê,Å{<\/,¢,¢/*³<C},Å,·B ) [The japanese won't print right]
Iie, kore de {kekkoo/ii/*genki} desu.
Note: _Kekkoo_ sounds a little more formal than _ii_.

So, you've got an English sentence, a real Japanese translation with multiple choices, including one that doesnft work (marked with an asterisk), and a roomaji transliteration. And you also have a valuable note about usage and how the variants come across.

Another nice feature is that it clearly delineates where the pitch rises and falls for a given word...which is much easier to contend with than the mere acute accent mark used by many other Romanized dictionaries.

And there's a Japanese-English section at the back as well, which gives you a mapping to which entries in the dictionary you can look for a Japanese word under--also quite helpful and surprising. There are also a few appendices including a clear and concise grammar summary, a list of business-related terminology, and a few other tidbits. Overall, I can picture myself using this dictionary constantly throughout my beginning studies...only supplementing it when I need to look up a specific and less common word.

This is my first review. But I just had to write it after using this dictionary. I am a beginning Japanese student. This dictionary is so incomplete it is amazing! I have been using it a relatively short period of time. I've looked up about 25 words. Here is a list of words I have found (so far) that are NOT in this dictionary: illegal, grandfather, forgive. And I've only used it a short time. What other "basic" are missing, I wonder. Yet, they do include "Nostril". Now there's a word I use everyday! I am just going to have to buy another. This is too incomplete.

Update. Everything stated below is true, but I'm getting very irritated with this dictionary because often it omits the kanji. If you for instance look at the word "good" there is not a single kanji only hiragana.
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This is quite a good beginner's dictionary. It contains quite a bit of usage information as well as example sentences. That is what beginners need. Having said that i basically like the book, here are a few things to be aware of:
1. I would have liked to have more synonyms for many of the entries. Since there are only 4500 entries that would have been very easy to arrange. The descriptions of the words in very extensive, but, then, if you only provide one translation it kind of defeats the purpose of having a detailed description. For instance: A ladder is a structure consisting of two long pieces of wood/rope/metal with steps inbetween for climbing up or down. This is translated as "hashigo". I don't think anything is gained by the long definition of what a latter is.
2. My impression is that you only get a portion of the "approved" kanji despite other kanji being in frequent use as well. So there will be quite a bit of kana. For the learner it would have been very simple to also add more kanji. See below for a dictionary that does add more kanji. It seems like the authors have made a conscious decision to keep kanji to a minimum. I wish they would have provided some comments in the introduction.
3. The book has a western-mindset tendency, despite its authors being Japanese. Just one example: If you look up "cooking", you get the Western way of cooking, but you don't get the Japanese cooking methods. This is not a serious problem, but it is an unpleasant tendency if you are working hard to get under the Japanese skin.
4. It uses romanji in addition to the Japanese characters. This is not a bit problem in my view, but it is kind of unnecessary.

Comparison with some other dictionaries
I don't understand why everyone publishes beginner's dictionaries and why nobody does an advanced dictionary for foreigners learning Japanese, but so be it. Here is a comparison with some other English to Japanese dictionaries:
1. Kodansha's Communicative English-Japanese Dictionary is not very good at all (see my review). Too few entries and not many sentence examples.
2. Kodansha's Furigana English-Japanese Dictionary is very good because it also presents a lot of kanji alternatives. That is something which I like. The book states that it includes many kanji that educated Japanese are expected to know. In terms of usage information, this book is not as good.
3. Kodansha's Effective Japanese Usage Dictionary: A Concise Explanation of Frequently Confused Words and Phrases. Nothing really wrong with that book consisting of around 700 words. However if you buy the current dictionary you get most of the information about usage anyway. Plus 3800 entries. Off course less detail on the 700 hundred, but you don't need 20 sentence examples, three will do. (But by all means check out author Kakuko Shoji. She has written some useful usage books.)
4. Oxford and Random House also has dictionaries but I have only scanned them briefly in the book store. The reason being that they contain very little usage information. So they were off my radar screen
5. A college dictionary aimed for the Japanese market. There are loads of them, but not on amazon. I do not recommend any. These books are not recommended as they are written for Japanese. Typically in an English to Japanese dictionary you do not get the kanji for many words. The Japanese already know them so no need to add them in terms of space. And off course whatever explanatory notes are going to be way too difficult to understand.

As you might be able to discern my key need is a dictionary which has usage information. If an English word has five translations into Japanese, ideally I would like to have all five explained to me. If I can't have I would like to have at least two-three explained to me. The problem with some beginner's books above is that they only give one translation or two translations but without any or little usage information. Hence my recommendation of the current book. The book is not perfect, but quite okay.

If you only have interest or money to buy one English-Japanese dictionary, there is no discussion. You should buy Kodansha's Furigana English-Japanese Dictionary. If you want to buy a second English-Japanese dictionary, you should consider the current book. You should then really study the book from the beginning to the end. If that would be too much work for you, do not buy this book. Stick with the Kodansha Furigana.

For a dictionary so thick, this one certainly lacks a LOT of very basic words. After looking up just a few words, I quickly fell back to using my much slimmer Japanese-English/English-Japanese resource, because this one just doesn't have the information. A lot of space is taken up by larger-than-normal font size and spacing. I'm still looking for a good English-Japanese dictionary, but until then, almost anything is better than this.

In awarding this book three stars, I'm judging it by the standards of bilingual dictionaries worldwide, in any language. Judging it solely by the standards of Japanese-language bilingual dictionaries--which are all too often characterized by inadequate text length, inadequate physical size, and inadequate physical durability--I would give it four or even five stars. While it would be nice in the future to have a non-"Basic" version of this dictionary that was two or three times as long, in a larger format, and in hard covers, what this dictionary achieves is nevertheless impressive, particularly in its fairly careful identification of various alternative meanings of the English vocabulary items.

In closing, I have to take note of the fact that one of the book's authors is Professor Mieko Ohso of Nagoya University; and point out that it's a good thing she didn't go by the nickname "Mie" and marry a man named Horney. Because then she'd be Mie Ohso Horney. Although I'm a serious student of East Asian languages and cultures, it was entirely necessary for me to make that observation. Your forgiveness is appreciated.

This is my favorite Japanese dictionary mainly because they give specific definitions with each Japanese word. With other dictionaries I would have to look up the english word I wanted, I would get several different Japanese words and then I would have to look up each of those Japanese words to figure out which word had the right meaning. This was really annoying and sometimes didn't tell me what the word meant as acurately as I would like. I love this dictionary and I am so glad I bought it.

a superb dictionary with a wealth of information about japanese and fraught with example sentences in full context. although it is not as comprehensive as other furigana and kanji dictionaries it has more useful and daily used words. geared for elementary and past elementary learners.