Oxford Beginner's Japanese Dictionary (Multilingual Edition)

I bought this book about 10 years ago for college but due to life getting in the way, I had to postpone my Japanese learning journey. I started learning the language again last year and was very happy to find this book when cleaning my home. It has a bunch of vocabulary that a beginner would find very useful. The dictionary is split into two sections: one where the words are organized in alphabetical order in Japanese and the other where words are listed in English alphabetical order. You will not regret paying the $15 to have a copy of this.

I have used this dictionary for many years, and re-ordered it many times over as I give my copies away to others who are studying. I used in extensively in Japan. It includes sections of Japanese cultural notes, and sections on how-to-use guides. Its examples are quite illustrative, showing how something could be used. It does assume you are learning Japanese from elsewhere, and will either know sentence structures, or be able to look them up.My personal favorite feature is that it does not use romanized characters (English letters) in it Japanese sections. This is a must for a serious language student, because romanized letters are well-documented to impede Japanese language acquisition: there are multiple ways to transliterate Japanese words. Most importantly, if you're in Japan, and must depend on English letters, then you are functionally illiterate.This dictionary is not exhaustive, but no portable dictionary could possibly have every word you might want in it. That said, it's small enough to be portable--barely--namely in cargo pockets or in a backpack. Yet it is large enough to be easy to read, and have a solid selection of words. If you are serious about learning Japanese, it might be worth investing in a second more-comprehensive dictionary, I have certainly purchased several. However, this is the dictionary you want with you when you are walking around town, or driving to a friend's place. It followed me everywhere. This is bar-none, my favorite English/Japanese dictionary.(I lived 2 years in Japan, and continue to study the language with an eye to return there permanently.)

Most of the rest of the reviews cover the pros and cons of this book. But they leave one important bit of information that I wanted (before I bought the book) and could not find: how many words (entries) it has. The book itself doesn't say this, but I estimated (counting entries per page on three pages, taking the average, and multiplying by pages. The answer seems to be about 4500-5000 entries. So there: there's the info for those looking for it (like I was).That's pretty small for a dictionary, but fair for a beginner's dictionary. The word choice seems a bit odd though. For instance, there is no entry for "hip", but there's an entry for "intensive care unit". There's no entry for "wire" but there's an entry for "zebra crossing". Really? How many Zebra Crossings are there in Japan? This makes me wonder how these words were chosen. It clearly wasn't a word frequency list or something like "basic english". I kind of expect beginners are more likely to want to know words like wire and hip than words like intensive care unit and zebra crossing.Nonetheless I give this dictionary a recommendation, because it's the only dictionary I know of that lets you look up alternative conjugations of a word and find something. For example, if you are a beginner and hear "itte", which is a form of iku (to go), and try to look it up in some other dictionary, that word likely won't appear as "itte" in any Japanese-English dictionary I know of besides this one. Same thing with "yonde" and so on; it's very useful for a beginner to be able to look up the "non-dictionary" forms of words and be directed towards the dictionary form.

Super quality paper. Easy to look things up in. Has dictionary exercises that I haven't done but love that it is there. Feels right in the hand. Great size as well. This thing has gotten a lot of use and is still looking great.

cheap but effectivePretty solid choice if you need something like this.

I'm totally loving this dictionary! I get on the internet all the time, and lots of times if I want to know any words or search up any particular grammar rules I do it on Google and I've always thought that that's enough and all I really need. But there are times where I don't really feel like I want to bother with it. And it really is SO useful to have an actual dictionary on hand. This dictionary also has usage notes in between the english-japanese and japanese-english sections and at the very end of the book at that makes it so much easier! It has a hiragana and katakana chart and it even has lists of words by category. (Like listing off the words for all different types of fish or fruit or something) Another thing that I appreciated was how they had absolutely no romaji. Which is wonderful because it forces you to practice your kana reading skills. When learning Japanese, it is very important to avoid romaji as much as you can.As for the actual shipment, it came quickly and I was very satisfied to see that it was in a flawless condition.I strongly recommend this to anyone who wants to learn Japanese. It is VERY useful and I love it to death.

This is a useful book and is excellent in having hiragana as well as katakana and even a little Kanji. The content is very clear to use ane I liked the use of colours to assist the searching. Only one issue is the order used in hiragana which uses a different system to the one generally taught to begginers. Thus they should have provided a book marker with a tabulation of the order in hiragana .