Collins Shubun English Japanese Dictionary =

This book seems to be missing a lot of words. There have been several times I have tried to look a word up and have not found it listed. Most likely, it has just the most commonly used words. If this is all you need, this is a good dictionary to buy. If you want a reference of a large vocabulary, go for another.

This book is the perfect pocket-size companion for foreigners living or travelling in Japan. The book is small and lightweight, so can be taken anywhere. Despite its size, the content is more comprehensive than most larger size dictionaries and the Japanese is written both in Kanji/hiragana (useful for showing to Japanese people) and Romaji. There are clearly presented usage examples and key words are explained in more detail. The detail of this book makes it useful to anyone studying Japanese from beginner to advanced level.

Best English-to-Japanese dictionary I've owned. Good binding with all-weather plastic covers. Gives romanized and Kanji/Hiragana spellings of words, and invaluable example sentences. The book contains a surprising range of words. One weak point: the dictionary does NOT ALWAYS give the polite forms for verbs (e.g., does URU become URIMASU or UMASU ?). To complement Collins/Shubun's dictionary with another dictionary listing (among other things) verbs in both dictionary AND polite forms, in romanized form only, try ISBN #0-8048-1588-7