Practical English-Japanese Dictionary

I already had several English-Japanese Dictionaries when I picked up this one on sale. It is small and portable, but I like the fact that it gives not only the romaji (English alphabet)for pronuciation, but also the kanji or kana showing how it is written in Japanese. I only rate it 4 stars because of the binding. I have the 3rd printing from 1993. It is "perfect binding." This means the pages were cut flush and held to the spine with glue. In this case, the glue was not strong enough and even though I haven't used the dictionary a lot, some of the pages have come loose and I have to keep a rubber band around it. A book like this should have sewn signatures. There are plenty of low priced books that do now. While we shouldn't comment on other reviews, the one from Cincinnati that was posted on 9/15/00 made me wonder if the writer (who liked it) was writing about the same book.

As the title says, this is a very practical dictionary. Most important, I think, it is written by a "gaikokujin" FOR "gaikokujin" so the English is right on target, not stilted, bizare shakespearean English one often finds in Japanese/English dictionaries. However, it is English to Japanese only, which is very limiting. Still, living in Japan, this is my dictionary of choice...guessing at the meaning of Japanese words and looking up the English to confirm. The whole problem could be solved by simply selling an electronic version...just scan the thing in and put it in adobe acrobat, then we could search for anything!

This is a very good dictionary for it's size and is great for classroom use. It has hirigana, romaji(romanized Japanese alphabet), kanji, and some katakana when it is used in a word instead of hirigana (hirigana and katakana are based on the same alphabet but use different symbols). It is based on romaji which makes it wonderful and easy to look things up in so you don't have to memeorize the letter order of the Japamese alphabet since it is different from english, but you have to be able to translate the hirigana/katakana/kanji into romaji to make this work. Also right next to the romaji word is it's counterpart in real japanese using the other 3 alphabets previously mentioned. This book does not have English to Japanese translations, you must have some knowlege of the Japanese alphabets to use this book the way it was meant to be.