Customer Reviews

Langenscheidt's Pocket Japanese Dictionary: Japanese-English English-Japanese (Pocket Dictionary)

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The book is very handy for day to day usage. It has a great up to date listing of words. Every word is given in both romaji and Kanji (plus Hiragana and Katakana when necessary) form of the words with both English-Japanese, Japanese-English handy listings. But I found it difficult to find some words we learned in Japanese language. Overall a great quick reference dictionary.

I bought this dictionary used on eBay, thinking it was the more current 2001 edition which has very positive reviews on Amazon. Little did I realize that this is simply a copy, letter for letter, of the Random House Japanese Dictionary I checked out from my local library. There are several things which I dislike about this dictionary:

There are also a lot of terms which aren't cross-listed on both sides. For example, "futari," meaning two (in reference to people), appears on the Japanese side, but does not appear under the entry for "two" on the English side. Oddly enough, this is not an issue for "hitari," meaning one (person); that entry is found on both sides. Similarly, the short form of "four," "yo," does not appear on either side of the dictionary, but it is very common, as in the phrase "yo ji" (4 o'clock). There are dozens of examples similar to this, but it makes it very difficult to find what you're looking for, especially in the English section, which appears to be missing more than the Japanese section, at least for basic words such as these.

The dictionary does include certain common suffixes on the Japanese-to-English side, which is helpful, but what's not helpful is that some are included and others aren't. It's very hit-or-miss.

It should also be noted that in terms of length, it's heavily weighted in favor of the English-to-Japanese section. It's 666 pages total, of which only 273 (40% of the dictionary) are Japanese-to-English. I'm not sure if this is significant on its own or not, but it seemed like it would be worth mentioning.

I'm only a beginning student of Japanese, but I'm having a lot of trouble finding common terms from the Pimsleur Japanese course, such as "ittekimasu" (translated in their course as "I'm leaving, I'll return"). This book might be a useful reference for a more advanced student of the language, but it is certainly not a good learner's dictionary.