Guide to Reading & Writing Japanese (Hanshall 2003) - Book Review

Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese

Genre: Japanese Language / Kanji Dictionary
Author / Publisher: Kenneth Hanshall / Tuttle (3rd ed., 2003)

review in one breath

Out of all the many books I have used to help acquire the Japanese language, Tuttle's Guide has undoubtedly been the MOST helpful and most used. One the one hand, this reference provides an excellent (and highly useable) dissection of *each* of the almost 2000 basic Kanji characters promulgated by the Japanese educational department. On the other hand, it conveniently indexes these 2000 Kanji by (a) pronunciations and (b) number of strokes, I simply cannot tell you how often I had to resort to "number of strokes" to decipher an otherwise unintelligible character. This book has literally been priceless to me.