The New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary: Based on the Classic Edition by Andrew N. Nelson

Rating:
Summary: Improvements?... only for the new user, perhaps...
Review: ...in which case, you won't know what's been improved upon, will you?

As has already been noted, this new version of the Nelson dictionary has been reworked and then some. It was rearanged into a form which makes switching from the old version to the new one a task of herculean size. In short, if you have the old one don't throw any money after the good money you already spent.

For first-timers to the big dictionary realm, this presents certain conveniences (how things are aranged, etc.) which may be useful. Beware, however. If you ever intend to use an actual Japanese character dictionary, this may throw you for a loop. The old edition is a much better stepping stone.

For anyone who is thinking of getting in to studying characters, find another dictionary and buy this when you get your first 700 or so under your belt (a few people have lived to regret splurging for Nelson's too early).

Rating:
Summary: Do not waste your money
Review: Are you going to buy The New Nelson Dictionary? Do not do it. Why? Are you used to your favourite radical-preference system in the original Nelson which made, within its own scope, finding any character as easy as possible? Forget it. The New Nelson rearranges the structure of the dictionary re-introducing obsolete meaning-based radicalsEwhich were so fiercely criticised in the first edition of NelsonLs dictionary. Just for example: tane(offspring) in the original Nelson under rad. 4 is listed under rad. 130 which is loosely connected with its meaning. However, while in The New Nelson to recognize that 130 is a radical requires enormous empathy, the original Nelson's left-side preference system leads you directly to rad. 4. There are many more examples like that, e.g.:sen(thousand) 4 >24,maru(round) 4 >3, kyu(nine) 4 >5 To make the obsolete radical gibberish clearer, The New Nelson adds the Universal Radical Index, which cross-indexes each kanji entry by every radical or radical-like element. It means that above mentioned tane is listed in the index both under radicals 130, 4 and 5 etc. Nevertheless, the whole EmprovementEtakes up 14,375% of the dictionary, and the only thing it provides is excess weight. To sum up, the dictionary not only does not solve anything, but it even comes back to the system condemned as early as in Rose-Innes Beginners Dictionary of Chinese-Japanese Characters published in the beginning of the century.

Rating:
Summary: The Classic Nelson has been totally ruined
Review: I purchased the original Nelson in Japan in 1962, the year it was first published. Over the last 41 years, I have worn out at least 2 copies, and presently own three.

The original Nelson was a masterpiece and for many years has been considered 'the kanji bible' for those interested in mastering Japanese characters. Unfortunately, the new version (The New Nelson, as it is inappropriately called) is a disaster... for several reasons:

1. Nelson's original 12 Step system, though still shown inside the front cover, is now unusable. For example, if a beginner wants to look up the character 'wa' (meaning peace or harmony) which is comprised of 'nogi hen' (Radical 115) plus 'kuchi' (3 additional strokes), following Nelson's 12-Step system will lead to failure--the character is not listed under Radical 115. WHY? (See reason number 2)

2. The New Nelson lists the characters under the old traditional Chinese system based on the K'ang-Hsi Dictionary of 1716. Under that archaic system, the character in question 'wa' was listed under Radical 30 ('kuchi-hen') for some reason even the Chinese could not explain. Guess what?!? This is PRECISELY what Mr. Andrew Nathaniel Nelson, PhD, most wanted to avoid in his original dictionary because in the old traditional Chinese system there was too much that was illogical and unfathomable about the ordering of the characters. So the New Nelson dictionary destroys one of the main advantages of the original Nelson dictionary.

3. The New Nelson adds a bulky, cumbersome 230-page Universal Radical Index. Every character is listed under every possible incorrect radical that any one could possible think of, any more. The end result is a total dumbing-down of the process of learning the radical-stroke character look-up system. It also makes the dictionary much bulkier and heavier and less handy. It is analogous to equipping a car with 5 extra gas tanks and 4 extra engines--in case you run out of gas or have some sort of engine problem.

We need to answer these questions:

Is the New Nelson a better dictionary than the old one? Definitely, NOT! It actually destroys the main advantage of the original Nelson--its handy character look-up system.

Is the New Nelson easier to use? Definitely, NOT! You first have to unlearn Nelson's original system of character look-up, and then try to learn an archaic, cumbersome, illogical Chinese system.

My recommendations:

1. Get a copy of the old Nelson and treat it with the utmost care. It may be a long time before an equivalent dictionary is available again.

2. Write to Charles E. Tuttle, the publisher, and complain about this horrible New Nelson.

3. Write to University of Hawaii at Manoa and complain about what they have done to an outstanding dictionary, which now has become unavailable.

I have done all the above. But what about my copy of the New Nelson that I purchased about 5 years ago?

I gave up on trying to use it and am now thinking of donating it to a needy Japanese fish pond as a form of ballast for growing barnacles or some other form of marine life... somewhere it might be useful. I'm also thinking of the Zen-related ramifications... the sound a New Nelson makes when it splashes into a fish pond on a moonlit night...

Rand Dorsey
Japanese linguist with 41+ years experience studying, researching, listening to, reading, writing, speaking, teaching, and enjoying the Japanese language.

Rating:
Summary: The Universal Radical Index is wonderful for beginners
Review: I understand the frustration of the long-time Japanese linguist who wrote the review below and misses the Nelson dictionary that he became used to, but as a beginning Japanese learner, the new Universal Radical Index (URI) is extremely helpful. I am gradually using it less and less as I become more familiar with picking out main radicals, but in the meantime, if I'm stumped, I can always find kanji with the URI. The URI does add 230 extra pages, but even without that, this isn't exactly a book you can stick in your back pocket. Also, for beginners, remember to supplement your kanji-learning with books that focus on contemporary Japanese. Many times, I've memorized a new and interesting word I spotted in the Nelson, only to find out later that it hadn't been used for over a hundred years. (Although I admit that this is useful for providing amusement to my Japanese friends - the equivalent of a non-native English speaker confidently telling his friends that he "went thither".)

Rating:
Summary: The best kanji dictionary I have found
Review: I would suggest to anyone thinking about buying a kanji dictionary to look through the major ones, perhaps in a university library, to get a feel for them, because personal preference plays a huge role in selecting one that suits you. That aside, I have to say I can look up compounds faster with the Nelson than with any other kanji dictionary, and it has a huge amount of information. One minor quibble is that the binding of my book did not survive my all-too-frequent use of it!

Rating:
Summary: A must-have classic
Review: If you are serious about studying Japanese you need this book. It's the gold standard of Japanese language scholarship in English. Even if you use smaller dictionaries or an online dictionary for day-to-day work, you need this in your reference shelf. It *is* old-fashioned, of course, but this latest update is very welcome.

Rating:
Summary: A rite of passage for students of the language.
Review: The Kanji dictionary by which others are judged. It's difficult to fault Nelson's for completeness. Their system of arranging the characters is baroque and difficult to learn, however. It's a sort of rite of passage into learning japanese to learn to use this book. Someday soon kanji dictionaries will be ubiquitous software and help you find your kanji in seconds. Until then, this mammoth tome sets the standards by which others are judged.

Rating:
Summary: Significantly Improved though not Perfect
Review: The New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary is based on the classic Nelson edition, but has undergone significant thorough revision, although whether the changes be improvements or otherwise is debateable, insofar that this new edition little resembles its older counterpart save in content. In any case, neither editions of this dictionary are suitable for beginners in the language, offering scant help in point of usage and composition.

This edition of the dictionary has a totally new system of arranging characters, discarding the strange algorithmic system in favour of the much better traditional arrangement based on the arrangement by semantic components, known as radicals, used in Chinese dictionaries following the famous and authoritative 42-volume Kangxi Character Dictionary of the Chinese Ch'ing dynasty which sets out over 40,000 characters classified under 214 radicals. This is an improvement only insofar that the idiosyncratic algorithmic system of Nelson was replace by the traditional system. However, this transition was not completed, and, instead of the full traditional system being implement, only the veneer of using the traditional arrangement is present. Upon closer examination, one finds that certain characters have been classified under different radicals than that under the traditional system fixed by the Kangxi dictionary. Granted that the Kangxi dictionary is a Chinese work that would not contain kokuji, characters invented in Japan, but these characters are very few in number compared to those borrowed from China, and, in any case, were made up according to the principles of Chinese characters, thereby having a natural place in the Kangxi classification anyway. This half-hearted implementation of the traditional system is a great misfortune, for it is at once irritating and disconcerting, making the finding of certain characters a wild-goose chase indeed. Despite the deficiencies of this method of arrangement, it is yet a significant improvement on the ridiculous mathematical arrangement used in the classic peculiar to that book, making it difficult to move to the traditional arrangement used by most Japanese dictionaries.

This new edition is very much larger and heavier, and cumbersome to use, due to the inclusion of the Universal Radical Index. This URI would seem to be an attempt to repair the shortcoming in the arrangement of characters outline above. It lists each character under every radical that could possibly be the character's radical. This makes for a very big index, substantially increasing the book's bulk without adding functionality that could have been more easily achieved by proper traditional arrangement of characters. However, the arrangement being what it is, and the cross-references in the dictionary being almost eliminated altogether, the URI is more-or-less essential.

All, however, does not bode ill for the dictionary. The quality of the entries themselves are what they always have been: clear, concise and comprehensible. They have been thoroughly revised to make the definitions more up-to-date and more copious, a number of new words having been added. In terms of content, there is indeed a noticeable improvement. Note, though, that this is not a writer's dictionary, for it gives no indication of how a particular character or word might be used. Rather, it is for the reader who encounters unknown words in a text he reads, and desires to seek its meaning in the dictionary. For this latter use, the dictionary serves its purpose admirably, having such a comprehensive vocabulary that one seldom notices its omissions.

Physically, the dictionary is well produced, giving allowances for its large size. The print is sharp, clear and not too small; the liberal use of white space gives the page a much more appealing look. This book is also well bound and generally handsome in appearance, the weighty tome it is.

Whilst I would not dissuade a potential buyer from this book, I would advise him to consider carefully whether the classic edition, despite its awkward algorithmic arrangement and silghtly dated entries, might not better suit his needs than this new edition. I would not hesitate to recommend this edition to any advanced student of the language, the two main detracting factors being the arrangement of characters, which is no worse than in the classic edition and its size. Nonetheless, if size is no consideration, then this is indeed an improvement on the classic edition, albeit not perfect, but nonetheless having a better arrangement of characters, a more copious vocabulary and more up-to-date entries. In short, this new dictionary is certainly better than the classic, and surpassed by few other Japanese-English character dictionaries on the market, and flawed though it is, nonetheless indispensable for the serious reader of Japanese.

Rating:
Summary: Very useful and complete dictionary
Review: This dictionary is not for beginners since it does not include the stroke order, however it has some very interesting points: 1.- Covers every possible kanji used in modern Japanese, +7000 2.- It includes some variants or ancient forms that still appear on some papers or publications 3.- It has a "God bless the editor" Universal Radical Index URI where you cand find a Kanji by whatever radical it includes not only by the official one. It really speeds up to WARP the localization of a kanji it does not matter how complex. 4.- It has plenty of compounds JUKUGO and it is not difficult to get to a second position compound using the URI index.

I would recommend it for a student on 2nd year or above.