The Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary

A revised, expanded edition of the best-selling Japanese-English character dictionary—the most comprehensive and up-to-date dictionary of its kind, with over 3,000 characters

Japanese language learners now have instant access to a wealth of accurate and in-depth information on kanji, including their meanings, readings, stroke order, and usage in compounds.

Includes 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.

Features include:

• 3,002 kanji entries—772 more than in the first edition—reflecting recent changes in the government-prescribed Jōyō and Jinmei Kanji lists
• Includes latest 2020 revision of Education Kanji from 1006 to 1026
• Readings shown in kana instead of romanized Japanese
• Core meaning keywords that define the dominant sense of each kanji, followed by character meanings, or specific senses the kanji can have when used in the living language
• Thousands more compounds and other usage examples
• Expanded coverage of name readings
Gives alternative forms of kanji when more than one is considered acceptable according to the most recent Jōyō Kanji specifications
• Cross-references to entries in The Kodansha Kanji Dictionary, a revised and expanded edition of the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary

Kodansha’s Kanji Learner’s Dictionary is the most powerful kanji-learning tool ever devised."Up-to-date, reliable, and easy to use … this beautifully designed dictionary meets the needs of a wide range of Japanese language learners."—Y.-H. Tohsaku, President, American Association of Teachers of Japanese



"A must for those who wish to overcome the obstacles posed by the study of kanji … an excellent tool that allows even beginners to look up kanji with ease."—Akito Ozaki, President, The Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign LanguageEditor-in-Chief Jack Halpern is the CEO of THE CJK Dictionary Institute (CJKI) in Japan. The Institute is one of the world’s prime sources for CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) dictionaries, and specializes in compiling comprehensive CJK and Arabic lexical databases. A lexicographer by profession, Halpern spent sixteen years compiling the New Japanese-English Character Dictionary, also newly revised and republished as The Kodansha Kanji Dictionary.