Basic Japanese-English Dictionary: An Easy-To-Use Dictionary for Beginners

Rating:
Summary: Decent but...
Review: Its strength is the large amount of example sentences. You can learn a lot from this, but personally I find myself not using it very much. Whenever I need to look up a word, this dictionary very often falls short due to it only having 3 000 entries. I would instead recommend Kodansha's Furigana Japanese Dictionary (hardcover) which I recently bought and was positively surprised by. It has roughly 30 000 entries and many useful example sentences. 30 000 is infact not that much either; to find rare words you'd want one with 60 000+ entries as well. Also, this dictionary uses romaji while the Kodansha one does not. Romaji (Japanese written in the Roman alphabet) is clearly an evil to be avoided. It's tempting as a complete beginner to make use of romaji in one's studies, but imagine all the reading practise you are depriving yourself of. Once you get a bit of practise you will find that reading kana isn't very painful. The book does have Japanese script with furigana as well, but i find that it's hard to avoid reading the romanization. Also, this is one of those books that rudely closes itself automatically, while the Kodansha one doesn't. The binding is bad in my opinion. All this is atoned for somewhat by the low price (1103 pages for $13.27). But only if you're a complete beginner and too poor to get the Kodansha right now would i recommend buying it.

Rating:
Summary: AAAAAGGGGHHHH!
Review: Most prior reviews to this one will have you believe that this book is the answer to your prayers, if you have just started learning Japanese...... WRONG.......It will only work for you if you are smart enough to buy the reverse ie English to Japanese......and there are plenty of each way translation books about which are better for the complete beginner.. If you have learnt enough to get past the - (noun) wa (noun) desu - stage, and have a reasonable level of understanding Japanese, then this book is more in your league.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent dictionary
Review: This dictionary is an invaluable reference to Japanese words. Many easy to understand examples of usage shown in English, Konji and Romanji.