Whenever I'm in Half Price books, I wander over to the Foreign Language section to see what new system for studying Japanese has been published. Yesterday, I snapped up this little gem for $2.98 ($8.95 list price).
As the title Hippocrene Handy Dictionary suggests, this really is a handy little dictionary/phrasebook for the person travelling to or living in Japan. Because it is targeted for at non-students of Japanese, people who need to be able to communicate in Japanese, it does not use standard romanization, but its own system of transliteration (dess not desu, shta not shita). That is, it provides a pronunciation guide rather than a romanized writing of the Japanese word.
The first 69 pages is an English to Japaneses phrasebook arranged in alphabetical order. The words and phrases included seem to be those most needed by the business traveller. Although I'm not sure why "vagina" is included, but "penis" is not. (No I don't normally go straight for the sexual terms in a dictionary. It just happened that the V words took up less than a page and "vagina" caught my eye.)
For me, the real strength of the book is in the next section, a list of common Japanese phrases in kanji, grouped by category, with their English pronunciations and translations. I'm not sure how useful this section is to the beginner. My experience with people who haven't studied kanji at all is that they can't distinguish one squiggle from another--which would make it hard to find the corresponding entry in the dictionary (especially since the type's point size is quite small). But for anyone who can recognize kanji easily, this section is a godsend because it lists the kanji phrases that you see at the bank, the train station, on road signs, on forms. How many times have I looked up kanji one-by-one and then tried to figure out the compound meant?
This is a great little book at a bargain price. It should be in every new JET participant's survival pack.
Posted by M Sinclair Stevens
March 10, 2002
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Hippocrene Handy Dictionaries: Japanese
Lexus Ltd. Hippocrene Books, New York. 1988