Review of Kanwa chu jiten by Dylan W.H. Sung

Came in a box cover and a paper dust cover, and included an extra list of kanji for Japanese names printed on a folded slip of yellow paper.

A Japanese-Japanese dictionary containing 9500 character with 82,000 kanji compound entries in 1271 pages no including appendices and indexes.

Huge appendix of supplementary subjects in p.1272-1534, including :

History of Kanji, discussions on borrowings of Chinese readings, a discussion on Chinese prosody and Chinese poetic forms, serving as an introduction to Chinese linguistics due to the importance of tones and poetical prosody. All character entries are given a rhyme which in turn gives the character a reference to the Chinese tone from the 106 rhyme ShiYun tradition. There are also maps of China and Japan, weights and measures, calligraphy of the Chinese Thousand Character Classic (QianZiWen) (standard and cursive forms), a summary of the history of China and important dates in Japanese and world history, derivation of the kana syllabaries, readings of characters used in names, an On-Kun index of characters, and index of characters according to stroke order, and the Jouyou Kanji list in go-juu-on order with each character written stroke by stroke. Also, there are old diagrams of temples, art and technology of the past, and throughout the dictionary, there are illustrations of items referred to by certain characters.

Extra Kanji information (such as 'ideogram' and/or 'sound compound') are given, in some cases it includes a tortoise-shell type script.

The dictionary is a good reference for those interested in Chinese literature, read from Japanese perspective.

I would recommend this to anyone solely for the appendix only, if you already possess a dictionary of comparable size.

☆ See all reviews by Dylan W.H. Sung.