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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.

The Kanji Dictionary

Genre: Japanese Language / Kanji Dictionary
Author: Mark Spahn (1996)

review in one breath

This has been my primary Kanji Dictionary for several years. It is impressively comprehensive, covering over 7,500 single Kanji characters (compare this to the Japanese Ministry of Education's list of 1850 "standard" Kanji) and almost 47,000 multi-character compounds. The dictionary itself is about 1700 pages.