Effective Japanese Usage Guide: A Concise Explanation of Frequently Confused Words and Phrases (A Kodansha Dictionary)

Rating:
Summary: Expensive but worth it!
Review: As both a high school and college teacher of Japanese, I use this book with all my students! You can look up words and grammar terms in the index (in hiragana - yay!) and then read an English explanation, with examples in Japanese. All kanji in the examples has furigana for the non-native teacher and student. The neat thing about this book is that it also compares terms that seem similar (like iru, kakaru, and hitsuyou). Regular dictionaries don't do this, and this book has 708 synonymous terms! Woo! No wonder Japanese is hard.