The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary Revised and Expanded

by Halpern, Jack; Tohsaku, Y. H.

• ISBN13: 9781568364070
• ISBN10: 1568364075
• Edition: EXP REV BL
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-05-31
• Publisher: Kodansha International

Summary

In this updated edition of the best-selling kanji dictionary, hundreds of new entries have been added to reflect recent revisions to the Joyo and Jinmei Kanji lists, or the sets of characters prescribed by the Japanese government for general use and in the formation of names. Three thousand and two kanji entries-772 more than the first edition-fill its pages. Hiragana (the basic Japanese syllabary) instead of Romanized Japanese, is used throughout to show the readings of the characters and of the compounds in which they appear. As with the first edition, the dictionary's basic goal is to give the learner a thorough understanding of Japanese characters by providing a wealth of useful information on their meanings, readings, and usage in compounds. Normally the learner must memorize numerous kanji compounds 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 character. By studying the core meaning in tandem with the detailed character meanings and usage examples that follow, learners will see how thousands of kanji are combined to form compound words. Another unique feature is the System of Kanji Indexing by Patterns (SKIP), an indexing system that enables the user to locate characters as quickly and as accurately as in alphabetical dictionaries. Modern linguistic theory has been effectively integrated with sophisticated information technology-and now, powerful design software-to produce the most accessible kanji dictionary ever compiled. With The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary: Revised and Expanded, learners have at their fingertips up-to-date information that is linguistically accurate, easy to use, and carefully adapted to their needs.

Author Biography

Jack Halpern is the CEO of the CJK Dictionary Institute in Japan, which specializes in the compilation of CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) and Arabic lexical databases and is one of the world's prime sources of CJK dictionaries. A lexicographer by profession, Halpern spent sixteen years compiling the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary published in the U.S. by NTC/McGraw-Hill in 1994.
As a research fellow at Showa Women's University in Tokyo, he was the editor-in-chief of several kanji dictionaries for learners, which have become standard reference works. Halpern has published over twenty books, including The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary: Revised and Expanded available in early 2013, as well as numerous articles. He has given over 600 public lectures on Japanese language and culture, and presented several dozen papers at international conferences. Jack Halpern has lived in Japan for over 30 years. He was born in Germany and lived in six countries including France, Brazil, and the U.S. An avid polyglot, he has studied fifteen languages (fluent in ten).