Learn Japanese Today

Today we’ll be taking a look at Kodansha’s Furigana dictionary. This review was the suggestion of my high school classmate Bento (nickname of my creation that he bears to this day). He’s spent some time in Japan, and he really wanted me to review this dictionary, which he often used instead of an electronic one. But also, if any of you loyal readers have an idea of something I should review, send me an e-mail at ongakun@gmail.com. I’d love to hear your ideas. Also if you have made or are working on some sort of Japanese learning material, I’d love to do a review to help you get the word out. I can’t promise it will be a favorable one (ask Khatzumoto ), but I can promise it will be fair.

On to the review, I mainly use Furigana for English to Japanese stuff, so that’s mostly what the review will focus on.

Ease of Use:8.5

Furigana (shown below) are the tiny hiragana that are written on top of a kanji to show its reading in case you don’t know the kanji.

This dictionary gets its name by having furigana for every kanji in every entry, which makes it incredibly useful as a beginner to intermediate dictionary. It kind of sucks to have to look up a word, and then look up a kanji right afterward. The book has pretty large type and a lot of spacing, which generally makes it pretty easy to find a word on the page. However, the large print also creates the problem of having you turning lots of pages to find your word. This dictionary can be bought in separate volumes for English to Japanese and Japanese to English, or one big volume. I have the two smaller ones, but they still share the common problem with the larger one in that they are an awkward size. The half-volumes are almost pocket-sized, but they’re a little too big and a little too thick to fit in your pocket, making them kind of convenient, but also an awkward size. I think the size of the dictionary is really my biggest complaint. Too big for your pocket, small enough to get awkwardly jammed to the bottom of your  backpack. But wait, I almost forgot, an amazing quality of this dictionary not shared by most other paperback dictionaries. It stays open on a flat surface by itself. I can’t stress enough how important this is, especially for a dictionary. It’s really frustrating to have to hold open a dictionary with  one hand while you try to type the word with the other. Furigana does it right.

Authenticity: 10

What this dictionary does a lot better than its counterparts is providing appropriate context for a word. The reason Bento really wanted me to write a review of this dictionary was because of the boatload of example sentences provided in each entry. This dictionary would be a great source for sentences to study if you follow 10,000 sentences program over at AJATT . Additionally, this dictionary, unlike some others, does not shy away from grammar and conjugations. In a lot of dictionaries, if you look up “probable” you’ll just find the word 多分 (tabun), which is correct, but this dictionary also tells you that you can change the end of the sentence to deshou or darou to achieve the same effect, and the example sentences show you that when you use tabun, you should almost always use deshou or darou at the end. It’s good stuff.

Quantity of Knowledge:8.5

There aren’t the ridiculous amount of entries boasted by WWWJDIC in this one, but each entry is brimming with knowledge. There are multiple definitions and different sample sentences for each definition and different contexts for each definition. I just opened it up to a random page and found the entry for “keep,” a word with multiple uses in English. There are 28 example sentences split over 16 definitions. It’s unbelievable. If the word you’re looking for is in there, you will not close the book unhappy. However, I do want to reiterate that this is a great Beginner-Intermediate dictionary. You will ougrow it.

Price: 7

The full dictionary goes for about $40, while the halves go for about 20 apiece. Not the cheapest dictionary you can buy, but far from the most expensive. And when you consider the added learning benifits from all the example sentences, you really aren’t paying for just a dictionary.

Fun:9

I generally get pretty excited to look something up in this dictionary. The example sentences provide great learning opportunities, and some of them are pretty funny. As dictionaries go, this is one of the more fun ones.

Overall: 9

Without going into the hundreds of dollars for a really good electric dictionary, you can’t get much better than this for a beginning to intermediate dictionary. That being said, the limited scope will sometimes send you looking elsewhere, but generally if you’re looking for one of the 14,000 entries in the book, odds are you’ll be satisfied. I really like this one, thanks Bento!

If you’ve been swayed by my review and can’t live without dictionary, click here

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