Kodanshas Elementary Kanji Dictionary (Japanese for Busy People)

Japanese is written with hiragana and katakana two sets of phonetic characters that represent all the sounds used in the spoken language and kanji, the Chinese characters for words that contain meaning. For students, learning kanji is frequently the most difficult obstacle in mastering an otherwise straightforward language, as the number of kanji used in written Japanese can be overwhelming the largest kanji dictionary has entries for more than 50,000 kanji characters. Typically, kanji books written for non-native learners of Japanese concentrate on either a core selection of up to 250 characters, enough to read approximately half of the content in a newspaper or magazine, or on all the 1,945 characters that have been selected by the Japanese Ministry of Education for daily use.

Kodansha's Elementary Kanji Dictionary is the only publication for non-native learners that presents a manageable number of the most frequently used kanji. These 1,006 characters are required learning in the six grades of elementary school in Japan, and can be used to read up to 90% of a daily newspaper.

Kodansha's Elementary Kanji Dictionary strikes a comfortable balance in offering a useful, yet condensed overview of the most important kanji characters.