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44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Indispensable Resource, April 9, 2003
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!
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One big lump of knowledge, August 22, 2005
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.
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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
If you will have only one kanji dictionary, get this., December 7, 1998
By A Customer
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.
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