Customer Reviews

Kodansha's Furigana Japanese-English Dictionary

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

 

 

If you're looking for a Japanese-English dictionary that doesn't have any romaji and uses furigana, this is your dictionary. It has about 14,000 common English words and has thousands of sentence examples (which is my favorite part of this dictionary).

Please remember though that this dictionary is ONLY Japanese-English and does not have English-Japanese. If you need an English-Japanese dictionary, then this dictionary is not for you.

In my opinion this is a great book for a beginner.

There is not a single line in romaji, so you have to know kana; I guess this excludes real beginners, say those living the first month of their Japanese learning experience. After that you will find this book an amazing source of information. Each entry carries furigana both in the search key and in the following examples. Said examples are by far the most precious part of this dictionary, as for most words there are at least a couple of useful expressions given as an usage example, while more complex or fundamental words have plenty of additional examples.

Very sporadically I found that some word I have in my electronic dictionary is missing, so I think that perhaps more advanced learners will find the vocabulary a bit limited, and this is the reason I think this is a perfect dictionary to start with. Again, there is only the Japanese-to-English part, so this is not the dictionary you need if you want to write something on you own.

I've had a lot of fun with this book. It's definietly less "gaijin" beginner than other dictionaries I have come across. I would've been happier with much more crammed into this, but that's what other reference books are for.

A very thorough dictionary that, unlike any other I know, displays both kanji and hiragana spellings of words, which is incredibly useful if you don't want to look dumb.

If you managed to scroll down to this review, consider yourself lucky because I will give you an honest report of this dictionary and why you should spend your money elsewhere.

First of all, this dictionary is nowhere near what it is claimed to be. "The essential dictionary for all students of Japanese" is written on the cover. This couldn't be further from the truth. I thought this dictionary would be very large because of its large page size and useful due to its "furigana" approach. I figured it'd be the "end all" of dictionaries for me as far as "medium-to-large" sized dictionaries go. Boy, was I wrong.

This dictionary is less than an inch thick, and the writing size on the dictionary is normal-sized... meaning it isn't condensed. When flipping through it, right away you notice that it doesn't have that many works in it. The worst part was I looked up a simple word "spider" which is kumo in Japanese with a bit of excitment, and was shocked that it is not even in this dictionary. The feeling of my heart sinking after I waited 2 weeks for this to come in the mail was very unpleasant. This book is absolutely useless. I looked up many other common simple words only to find them not included either. If you look at the 3-star review, you will see someone else agrees with me on this exact point. If you were to translate a book with this dictionary, the reading level of that book if all the words were to be in this dictionary would be that of an elementary school child... or less. Something along the "Berenstain Bears" reading level for Japanese. I'm not joking around either.

This is a huge waste of money for me. They really f-ed the dog on this book. If there is one "silver lining" that I can learn from from this purchase, it's that never to believe everything you read on the 5-star reviews.

I have been learning Japanese for a number of years, and this is the second Japanese/English dictionary I had bought. It worked fine at the beginning, but as I got into reading more complicated texts, the faults became more and more visible.

There is just not enough vocabulary in this book. At times I would have to switch back and forth between the two dictionaries I owned, hoping one of them would carry the word I was looking for. Kodansha's dictionary is a huge disappointment; the quality of it otherwise is very nice. The cover is gorgeous and the semi-hard cover makes it durable yet still flexible. The entries that ARE in the dictionary come with a number of examples on how to use the words, and that is always helpful when attempting to write something. However, as I use the dictionary to look up words I don't know yet, it becomes ultimately useless.

i love this dictionary, since it uses furigana and no romaji, it gives me extra practice reading japanese. my romanized dictionary includes the kanji for words as well as the romanized japanese word, but this furigana dictionary is cooler because it gives you the kana above the kanji so you know which kanji is what pronounciation!

i guess the only thing that sucks about it is that it was only japanese-english and not english-japanese....there is another dictionary for that... and that annoyed me when it was delivered to my house and i discovered i would need to buy ANOTHER dictionary for looking up english-japanese stuff.