The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary

Overall, a good dictionary for beginners (like me). You will certainly want a more comprehensive dictionary if you keep studying Japanese, though.


The _BEST_ Kanji dictionary for beginning to low advanced   May 9, 2003
44 out of 46 found this review helpful

I cannot recommend this dictionary highly enough. There is simply no better dictionary for beginning and intermediate students, and it can be used even into advanced studies. I will be taking the Japanese Proficiency test for 2 kyu soon, which requires reading over 1,200 kanji, and I still use this dictionary. If it had been published when I first began my Japanese study, I might be making plans to take the 1 kyu test instead of 2 kyu. It's that good.

When I came to Japan, I inherited three kanji dictionaries from various sources, and they were all basically useless, even though I had already studied Japanese off and on for a total of about a year's worth of university-level coursework. I went shopping for a new dictionary a few months after getting here, and thankfully I found the Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary, which had just been published a short time before.

The SKIP lookup system makes so much sense that I wonder why no one had ever thought of it before. While it does take a small amount of practice to become completely proficient in using SKIP, the traditional indexing by radical is so cumbersome that you often have to fall back on the possible readings (on-yomi or kun-yomi) for a character to find the right entry. If you are trying to find a totally unfamiliar kanji, whose reading you don't know, this is completely hopeless.

The Kanji Learner's dictionary also includes a radical index for those who learned the traditional system, or for the very few cases where looking things up by radical is faster or easier. In other dictionaries, main indexing is _only_ by radical. This is a problem since many modern kanji have been simplified so much that the original radical it is traditionally indexed under has been simplified out of existence. That was something I didn't know until I had already been studying Japanese for over a year. After looking for one character ("au," to meet) for almost 5 minutes, I had to ask my teacher where it was indexed in the class dictionary.

My test for which dictionary to buy was actually to see how easy it would be for someone with no prior knowledge to find the kanji for "au." Most dictionaries (and my teacher) list it under the radical entry for sun, which is no longer present in the modern form of the character. If you didn't already know about the "lost" radical you wouldn't be able to find it at all by using a traditional index, and if you already know that much about the kanji, you don't really need a dictionary to look it up!

The entries in the Kanji Learner's Dictionary include the most commonly-used compounds, grouped by reading, and unlike almost every other dictionary I've seen so far, it includes words that do not use the entry kanji in the front position. The compound words include many technical terms and words that are often used in publications, but often are hard to find in anything other than a massively exhaustive word dictionary. The possible readings (yomi) are written in roman letters (romaji). Though some may say this is not a good thing, in that kana is ultimately more useful for learning to read Japanese, I think it should not be necessary for a student to have to learn all of the kana before starting to learn kanji.

The frequency of use ranking has been absolutely invaluable in furthering my studies. Some of the kanji introduced in the first six years of elementary school as dictated by the Ministry of Education don't even make the top 1,000 most used. Instead of using the Japanese education standards, I used the frequency table compiled for this dictionary. It made an immediate difference in how well I was able to pick up new kanji since the ones I was studying first were the ones I was most likely to see in newspapers and other publications.

The only downside to this dictionary is that it is somewhat limited for advanced studies. With entries for only 2,230 kanji, you sometimes cannot find an entry for some less common characters. Of course, once you progress to the point where you find a need to look up kanji that are not included in this dictionary, you can graduate to its big brother, the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary, which is the only other kanji dictionary I would recommend.

If you are a beginning through advanced-intermediate student of Japanese, buy this dictionary now! Save yourself the pain of struggling to learn a primitive and outmoded indexing system that requires knowledge of the characters that you are obviously still trying to acquire. Every minute you spend unsuccessfully looking for a character is a minute you could be studying instead. This dictionary will save you weeks worth of those wasted minutes and will give you the tools to intelligently study Japanese characters.

By the time you learn enough Japanese to require using a traditionally indexed dictionary, you will know enough about kanji to use that dictionary with the minimum of pain, though I guarantee you will miss being able to look up complicated kanji using the SKIP method. People who say otherwise are geniuses, total Japaniphiles who love everything Japanese regardless of how unnecessarily difficult some of their traditional ways of doing things can be, or those who invested massive amounts of time and effort in learning the "traditional" way and are jealous of the fact that this revolutionary dictionary only came out a couple of years ago.


Irreplaceable- for beginners and non-beginners alike   November 15, 2001
Charles E. Stevens
35 out of 35 found this review helpful

I'm not sure why I took so long to write a review for this dictionary ... I've been using the Kanji Learner's Dictionary for almost three years now and have nothing but good things to say about it. The best thing about this dictionary is its size. All of the commonly used kanji and kanji compounds are included in a compact volume. When you're reading a newspaper article and come across an unfamiliar kanji/compound, or when you're writing a letter (or homework, etc.) and you can visualize a character but can't quite remember how it's written, who wants to lug out some 100 pound (slight exaggeration) kanji dictionary when you can quickly leaf through this one?

Granted, once you get out of the beginning stages, you will need a more thorough dictionary. But I have found myself going back to this one every single time, unless there's a character or compound that doesn't appear in it (but honestly, I would say that happens only 1-5% of the time). It's that convenient.

If you are looking for your first kanji dictionary, definitely buy this one- you'll find yourself going back to it again and again. If you only have a huge kanji dictionary, buy this one too- you'll love the size, and be surprised by the fact that this dictionary actually has the vast majority of kanji/compounds that you're looking for ...


Don't be afraid of Kanji anymore!   June 28, 2000
Carlos Rodriguez (Mexico)
20 out of 20 found this review helpful

This book is nearly perfect. It's very complete and comes in a very handy presentation. You can quickly find the 2000 most used kanjis and learn how to write them correctly. Besides a kanji's core meaning, you learn frequent combinations with other kanjis, which helps a lot for context interpretation. The layout invites you to read on, even after you found what you wanted, it's beautiful! My fear to kanjis is gone. I learnt to break them down in pieces and now I remember them easier. I just wish that this dictionary had kana instead of romaji in the meanings part. There's also a lot of "wrongly-counted" kanjis (for those of us who still don't master the SKIP system) that somehow ruin the layout, although is very considerate and helpful from the editor to give us a shorcut instead of going like "you have to learn how to count strokes first before using this dictionary"! For those of you who find this book incomplete, I tell you, you can always go to its daddy, Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Character Dictionary. Let's learn kanji!


Reading Japanese just became a viable possibility   December 11, 1999
David Ayer (Toronto, Canada)
20 out of 22 found this review helpful

Tracking found kanji compounds is still not always the quickest thing to do (I can still mis-count numbers of strokes, etc.,) but with some patience it is possible with this dictionary to find virtually any kanji you set out hunting for. And when you find it, that's where the real value is--core meanings, rankings according to frequency of use, stroke order diagrams, and most of all a wack of compounds containing the kanji in question, regardless of where it appears in the compound. You're sure to feel empowered in your running battle with the outrageous number of kanji to be reckoned with in this nutty language. Gotta love it.