Helen FieldsScience Writer

This well-worn Langenscheidt’s Pocket Japanese Dictionary is one of my favorite dictionaries. After more than 10 years on various shelves, it’s recently started hitching rides in my purse again. Hello, adorable yellow Dictionary of the Week!

This is different from my other four Japanese dictionaries because it’s all in romaji, or roman letters. So you can use this dictionary to look up Japanese words even if you can’t read any Japanese at all.

You need this kind of thing when you’re starting out, because real Japanese writing is really complicated. The three writing systems are intermingled in sentences and even within words.

First: 漢字 (Kanji.) Kanji are borrowed from Chinese, and they almost always have at least two pronunciations.

Take this character, 食, which means “food.” In the verb 食べる (to eat), it’s pronounced “ta.” But in the verb 食う (to eat, but less formally) it’s pronounced “ku.” In combinations like 食事 (meal) it’s pronounced “shoku.” And that’s not even all the pronunciations for this one character.

Next: ひらがな (Hiragana.) The 46 hiragana characters make up one of the two phonetic alphabets in Japanese. In most written sentences, the kanji hold the meaning and the hiragana do all the grammatical heavy lifting. If you try to read Japanese and you don’t know kanji, you spend a lot of time reading verb endings. For example, in the verb 食べる, the る – “ru” – tells you it’s the infinitive.

In theory you could write everything in Japanese in hiragana, and that’s how children’s books are written; kanji are introduced gradually, as kids learn more and more of them in school. But it would be a huge pain reading a regular book written all in hiragana. A lot of Japanese words are pronounced the same, so you have to see the kanji to know if しんぷ means “bride” or “Christian priest.” If you’ve learned the characters, it’s much faster to read one or two characters that give a word’s meaning rather than a bunch of characters that only tell you what it sounds like.

Finally: カタカナ (Katakana). Katakana covers the same 46 sounds as hiragana but is used mostly for borrowed words, like スープ (“su-pu” – soup) and コヾプ (koppu – cup). Of course, Japanese didn’t just borrow words from English. パン (pan) is “bread,” from the portuguese word pão. アルバイト (arubaito) is “part-time work,” from the German word Arbeit.

Katakana is also used for foreign names. My name is ヘレン・フィールズ. The sounds in “Helen” (he re n) all exist in Japanese, but “Fields” is kind of a mess. Sounds that aren’t in the phonetic alphabet, like “fi,” are usually really hard for Japanese people to pronounce. I just go by ヘレン.

So, really – when you’re starting out, you want a dictionary like this one that converts everything into roman letters for you. I graduated from this dictionary within a year or so. Eventually it just gets too annoying that “ga” does not immediately follow “ka,” the way it does in Japanese. The dictionary is back into circulation now because I’ve joined a Japanese choir and didn’t think I’d be able to find things in my hiragana-based pocket dictionary fast enough…but actually I’m muddling along with no dictionary at all and doing fine so far.

Dictionary Stats: Langenscheidt’s Pocket Japanese Dictionary

date: 1998 (hey – this was brand-new when I moved to Japan!)
publisher: Langenscheidt Publishers, Inc., New York
by: Seigo Nakao
length: 666 pp (oh my)
useful advice: “A general guideline for the Japanese accent is to avoid putting a heavy stress on any syllable.”
guide words on p. 129: kiyasume, n. 気休め insincere reassurance or consolation; kodoku, n. 孤独 solitude; isolation
obscenities: くそ! They aren’t there! Well, you can’t look them up in English. くそ is in the Japanese section, but I’m not telling you what it means.