With The Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary: Revised and Expanded, learners finally have at their fingertips accurate and in-depth information on all the kanji prescribed by the Japanese government. In all, 3,002 characters—772 more than in the first edition—fill its pages, making it the most comprehensive and up-to-date dictionary of its kind. The main goal of the dictionary is to give the learner instant access to a wealth of useful information on kanji, including their meanings, readings, stroke order, and usage in compounds. Compounds pose a special problem for learners. Normally one must memorize them as unrelated units. A unique feature of this dictionary that overcomes this difficulty is the core meaning, a concise keyword that defines the dominant sense of each kanji, followed by character meanings, or specific senses the kanji can have when used in the living language. Together these features help learners understand the logic behind compound formation. Another unique feature is the System of Kanji Indexing by Patterns (SKIP), a revolutionary indexing system that has gained widespread popularity because it enables the user to locate characters as quickly and as accurately as in alphabetical dictionaries. With SKIP, all one needs to do to find a kanji is identify the geometrical pattern to which it belongs, then count the strokes in each part of that pattern—a much speedier process than searching by traditional methods. These features, and many more, make this dictionary the most powerful kanji-learning tool ever devised.

A groundbreaking bilingual kanji thesaurus that provides intermediate and advanced-level users with complete, precise guidance on the distinctions between characters of similar meanings. The Kodansha Kanji Synonyms Guide is the first-ever reference work to group together kanji characters that are related in meaning but different in detail. Arranged alphabetically by concept, these groupings let users focus on the often-subtle differences and similarities between them. Like The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary, and all of Jack Halpern's previous publications, The Kodansha Kanji Synonyms Guide is an innovative, authoritative, and impeccably-prepared resource that helps Japanese language learners deepen their knowledge of written Japanese, and provides educators, scholars, writers, and translators with an invaluable reference tool.

This dictionary comes complete with a grammar supplement and offers an extensive word count for its size. It will be of particular interest to 'A' level students.

Students who have completed a year of German read Brecht in their second year, those of Spanish read Cervantes. Teachers of first and second-year Japanese can often find nothing comparable. "Why aren't your students reading literature?" they are asked. "Why not Soseki? Or Murakami?" What are instructors of Japanese doing wrong? Nothing, according to the authors of this volume. Rather, they argue, such questions exemplify the gross misunderstandings and unreasonable expectations of teaching reading in Japanese. In Acts of Reading, the authors set out to explore what reading is for Japanese as a language, and how instructors should teach it to students of Japanese. They seek answers to two questions: What are the aspects of reading in Japan as manifested in Japanese society? What L2 (second-language) reading problems are specific to Japanese? In answering the first and related questions, the authors conclude that reading is a socially motivated, purposeful act that is savored and becomes a part of people's lives. Reading instruction in Japanese, therefore, should include teaching students how to work with text as the Japanese do in Japanese society. The second question relates more directly to traditional concerns in L2 reading. The authors begin with a general theory of reading. They then offer a welcome glimpse into the rich and complex perspectives-sometimes conflicting, other times symbiotic-on what reading is and how it is performed in L1 and L2, and, most importantly, on the web of interconnections between the phenomenology of reading and the demands it places on teaching approaches to reading in Japanese. With essays by Charles J. Quinn, Jr., Fumiko Harada, and Chris Brockett Foreword by J. Marshall Unger

This dictionary is designed for non-native speakers of Japanese, perfect for business people and students. There are over 50,000 entries, including the most common meanings. Japanese terms are shown in romanized Japanese and standard Japanese characters. The romanized entries are listed in alphabetical order, so no knowledge of Japanese is required.

Following the first volume of Remembering the Kanji, the present work provides students with helpful tools for learning the pronunciation of the kanji. Behind the notorious inconsistencies in the way the Japanese language has come to pronounce the characters it received from China lie several coherent patterns. Identifying these patterns and arranging them in logical order can reduce dramatically the amount of time spent in the brute memorization of sounds unrelated to written forms. Many of the “primitive elements,” or building blocks, used in the drawing of the characters also serve to indicate the “Chinese reading” that particular kanji use, chiefly in compound terms. By learning one of the kanji that uses such a “signal primitive,” one can learn the entire group at the same time. In this way, Remembering the Kanji 2 lays out the varieties of phonetic pattern and offers helpful hints for learning readings, that might otherwise appear completely random, in an efficient and rational way. Individual frames cross-reference the kanji to alternate readings and to the frame in volume 1 in which the meaning and writing of the kanji was first introduced. A parallel system of pronouncing the kanji, their “Japanese readings,” uses native Japanese words assigned to particular Chinese characters. Although these are more easily learned because of the association of the meaning to a single word, the author creates a kind of phonetic alphabet of single syllable words, each connected to a simple Japanese word, and shows how they can be combined to help memorize particularly troublesome vocabulary. The 4th edition has been updated to include the 196 new kanji approved by the government in 2010 as “general-use” kanji.