Japanese Dictionaries

When I first started learning Japanese, I bought two paper-based dictionaries (because they came highly recommended by the Nihongo o Narau site):

• Kodansha's Furigana Japanese - English, English - Japanese Dictionary, Kodansha International, ISBN4-7700-2480-0
• The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary, Jack Halpern, Kodansha International, ISBN4-7700-2855-5

I also picked up a second hand copy of A dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, Seiichi Makino and Michio Tsutsui, The Japan Times, ISBN4-7890-0454-6, because it was highly recommended by the author of JWPce and JFC (Glenn Rosenthal, in his Japanese page).

But a year down the track, I have never used the J-E/E-J dictionary, and have used the Kanji Learner's Dictionary only occasionally. I must admit to liking the grammar dictionary and have used it quite a few times - the section entitled "Characteristics of Japanese Grammar" alone is worth the retail price of the book, and the dictionary entries are insightful.

The Kanji Learner's Dictionary is not too bad - the entries are well organised, I just wish they would give the readings in kana rather than romaji.

But I've never even opened the J-E/E-J dictionary. I far prefer looking up unknown words electronically (see my next post on electronic dictionaries).

I find looking up words in paper dictionaries rather cumbersome, especially for Kanji characters. There's no easy way to look up an unknown Kanji character. If I knew how to pronounce it, then I could potentially look it up phonetically, but then if I knew how to pronounce it, it wouldn't be an "unknown character" would it?

Different dictionaries have different schemes, ranging from ordering the characters by their Bushu ("radicals") to various numerical indexing schemes based on the character's shape. The Kanji Learner's dictionary uses a system called "SKIP" which is probably easier than most but even then I have spent frustrating minutes looking for elusive characters (because I misapplied SKIP).

One of the reasons I have never used the Kodansha J-E/E-J dictionary is because the entries are ordered phonetically, so if I can't pronounce a particular Kanji it's pretty much useless.

My preference right from the start has been to use electronic (ie. computer-based) lookup dictionaries. My next post will summarise the various options I have tried.