The Kanji Dictionary Hardcover – April 15, 1996

Probably the best kanji dictionary. Everything is there, easy to use. What more could you ask for?

Good tool to have for learning

I've studied Japanese for 5 or so years now, and bought "The Kanji Dictionary" after I began to outgrow my first, smaller kanji dictionary. Even though I consider myself an advanced learner of Japanese, I have not felt the need to buy a "Japanese" Kanji dictionary yet: this one by Spahn and Hadamitzky has more than met my needs. Here are some of this dictionary's plusses:-Just about every kanji or kanji compound you can think of is included (they claim 47,000+ compounds which sounds about right).-The look-up system is easy to use, and the index is similarly helpful-The appendices are surprisingly interesting and informative, including information ranging from the reigns of the emperors to geography to even a list of the most frequent Japanese surnames.My only possible complaints are:-not enough radicals: they chose to categorize the kanji using 79 radicals instead of the 214 historical radicals. This resulted in almost 300 kanji that are "without" a radical, all lumped together at the beginning of the dictionary by the number of strokes. Many of these are very common kanji, which can cause frustrations if you're trying to figure out which radical to look up only to find that it's in the "no radical" section.-it would have been great if they'd had accent markings to show how the characters are pronounced. In Japanese, context and an accent shift are the only difference between saying "Let's have success!" and "Let's have sex!" (sex and success are both romanized "seikoo"). Native Japanese presumably know the difference in pronunciation, but learners of a second language are not as likely. This can result in awkward situations. Knowing the correct accent in general makes you much more understandable, and it is a shame that most dictionaries don't include this information.Overall though, this is a great dictionary. I highly recommend it for beginners, experts, and everyone in between!

I bought the 3 books of this series at the same time to have them as a reference, so I didn't read them from the beginning to the end. I have however checked multiples entries and the grammar is clearly and methodically explained every single time. Each time I use it I feel satisfied with the responses I find to my queries, learn something new, and am happy I bought these books.

Yeah, this book is HUUUUUGE, a total monster! But I can't imagine going without it. It really has everything in it. The only real pain was in taking a few hours to get used to using it properly. I managed to figure it out on my own, but it would've been nice if the detailed instructions were in the front with the introduction section rather than inside the back cover underneath a few thousand pages..... I also eventually found a copy of those instructions on a little card, but that itty bitty card was stuffed in between pages so far into the book I never would have found it unless I happened to flip to that exact page, and let's be honest here, shaking out one little card from such a massive book would not be an easy thing to attempt. Makes me feel like they intentionally made this difficult so you'd have to figure everything out the hard way to get anywhere with this book. BUT, it was still the best purchase I've ever made.Now I just wish I could find a book just as good as this one, but it's focused on vocabulary words using hiragana/katakana instead.

If you are a student of Japanese, you know how difficult it can be to identify Kanji and how many combinations they appear in. This dictionary is exactly what you need.Trying to identify Kanji on your phone or iPad is difficult because the software expects you to know the precise number of strokes and to get them in the right order. But all you need to do with this dictionary is to pick out a "radical" (a familiar component of the character) and look it up from there. Not sure how many strokes are involved? No problem -- just look through the list of characters with that radical. Not sure which radical to use? No problem -- you can look up a character using any of the radicals it involves.The next problem faced by students of Japanese is that Kanji characters appear in countless combinations, and these change both their meaning and pronunciation. This book is an excellent solution. Once you've looked up the first Kanji in the sequence, it lists all of the combinations that can follow. For each it provides a pronunciation and definition.This is a hefty book and it has a slip cover to keep it from getting too banged up. My copy is always on my desk because I'm always using it. I don't know how I managed to do my Japanese homework without it.

Great, comprehensive dictionary.A bit tricky at first - especially counting strokes correctly to find proper section to do the lookup.Wish it also had English to Japanese.

I've been using the older paperback version of this dictionary for years in Japan. Unfortunately, a paperback book of this bulk tends to break up into 3 or 4 parts, so I'd been looking for the hardback edition for some time. I am most appreciative of the ability to look up words made up of multiple characters (kanji) using any of the kanji in the word, since I sometimes know the reading of only the 2nd or 3rd kanji in the word; being able to find the word by that reading is much quicker than trying to find the kanji by its components -- infinitely easier in the case of hand-written characters. I was already acquainted with this dictionary (in its original incarnation) and I would highly recommend it to anyone with a limited knowledge of Japanese kanji. Delivery of my order was pretty much exactly as promised by Amazon.