Rating: 
Summary: I keep this by my desk ,always...
Review: I bought "The Learner's Kanji Dictionary", but I must say that this edition is much better. It is very easy to use, and I especially like the tabs (or whatever they are called) on the side of the pages. It would have been nice if the entries were written in kana istead of romanji. But overall the book is excellent and very nice! The lookup system is outstanding...
Rating: 
Summary: useful, but not portable
Review: I checked this book out of my local library, and kept renewing it until I couldn't renew it anymore. understanding how to look the kanji up is a little confusing at first, since the method is completly different from english dictionaries. instead of looking up kanji phonetically, you look the characters up by the base strokes used to create them. I have to admit, the first thing i started to translate was not from a textbook. it was a doujinshi, or japanese fan comic. i was able to find almost all of the kanji i looked for. it is a very comprehensive list of all the kanji you're likely to encounter. i highly recommend it to help you in translations and so forth. a drawback to this book is its size though. it's gargantuan. unless you have a very strong back or are slightly masochistic this is a reference book for home use only. it is also time consuming to search through all the entries to find the kanji you need to know. despite that, this is still a great kanji dictionary.
Rating:
Summary: top notch, even for a beginner
Review: I'd used a Kanji dictionary twice in my life before buying this, but I had to do a few translations and after playing with this book, there was no looking back.To be fair, I don't read Japanese fluently, nor do I speak Japanese fluently, far from it. However, when you need to translate a Japanese name or two, kanji will always come up. From me personally, it's for karate history. I find this book excellent, especially when compared to the others of its type, especially when it comes to numbering the kanji. The indices into the kanji characters are intelligent, that is, they contain information about the kanji itself. As an example, character SHIN, meaning "mind", "soul" has the index 4e5.1: 4 strokes for the radical (radical 4e), 5 strokes for the rest of the character. The Nelson just numbers sequentially and for the same character, you have #3245. This isn't to say that the Nelson is bad, but I feel that this dictionary is better thought out and more useful.
Rating:
Summary: The best kanji dictionay
Review: I'm studying japanese for about 9 years and this dictionary has the kanji compounds that we need. The others dictionary has few compounds and know only the means of two kanjis alone isn't enough to understand the real mean of a compound, for example, the kanji Ô (akai) means red and the kanji ½ (makoto) means truth, the compound Ô½ (makoto) means sincerity. If there was a CD version I'd rate it with 6 stars.
Rating:
Summary: Indispensable Resource
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: Indispensable Resource
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: Top-notch desk reference
Review: This is an outstanding dictionary for the serious student or translator of Japanese. Compounds (2 or 3 kanji) are listed under any of the kanji they contain, so you can find a compound under a simple second or third character almost before you can count the strokes in a complex lead kanji. Character pattern guides in the margins quickly let you know whether to scan forward or back. With all this information, the book is a hefty travel companion, so if portability is important, this won't be your one-and-only kanji dictionary.
Rating:
Summary: Top-notch desk reference
Review: This is an outstanding dictionary for the serious student or translator of Japanese. Compounds (2 or 3 kanji) are listed under any of the kanji they contain, so you can find a compound under a simple second or third character almost before you can count the strokes in a complex lead kanji. Character pattern guides in the margins quickly let you know whether to scan forward or back. With all this information, the book is a hefty travel companion, so if portability is important, this won't be your one-and-only kanji dictionary.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent choice especially for a beginner
Review: This is my only Kamji dictionary, so I don't really have a comparison for it, but I find it extremely useful. The option to look up compounds by any of the kanji is of immense utility to me. I have a more divided opinion on the simplified radical system they use. I don't know how much more difficult it would be to search through all 214 radicals rather than the 79 that Hadamitzky and Spahn use, but i do have occasional problems deciding which radical to use when none seem to match exactly. They do include a feature to help in this regard. Similar looking kanji are listed in the chart under the wrong radical with a pointer to the correct entry. All in all a worthy tome and one which sees great usage in my hands.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent choice especially for a beginner
Review: This is my only Kamji dictionary, so I don't really have a comparison for it, but I find it extremely useful. The option to look up compounds by any of the kanji is of immense utility to me. I have a more divided opinion on the simplified radical system they use. I don't know how much more difficult it would be to search through all 214 radicals rather than the 79 that Hadamitzky and Spahn use, but i do have occasional problems deciding which radical to use when none seem to match exactly. They do include a feature to help in this regard. Similar looking kanji are listed in the chart under the wrong radical with a pointer to the correct entry. All in all a worthy tome and one which sees great usage in my hands.
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