Collins Japanese Dictionary: Essential Edition (Collins Essential Editions) Paperback – September 1, 2018

The Japanese-English side is 223 pages long. At around 40 entries per page, this dictionary has around 9000 entries at most, which should be fine for basic queries. Words are ordered alphabetically according to their romanization, so this side of the dictionary could only ever be useful if you already know the pronunciation of a Japanese word. This could happen if you encounter a word while hearing Japanese speech, or if you are a Japanese speaker looking for an equivalent in English. If you need to read Japanese, this dictionary won't be as helpful, unless the word you encounter is written in kana, if someone can provide the pronunciation, or if you know kanji well enough that you can guess the pronunciation (though at that point you probably wouldn't be using this dictionary).The English-Japanese side is 206 pages long. At around 40 entries per page, this dictionary has around 8000 entries at most, which, again, should be fine for basic queries. Entries and example phrases seem to be focused on practical needs. Words such as bank, bed, booking, breakfast, bus, card, child, disabled, dish, flight, hospital, hotel, insurance, passport, phone, photo, repair, room, ticket and wheelchair have lots of examples and serve as a phrasebook of sorts.I can see this dictionary as a useful companion when travelling in Japan.However, if you want to read newspapers or literature in Japanese, this is definitely not the one, because of its limited vocabulary and lack of a mechanism to lookup kanji.Yet, because of its very limitations, I could see this dictionary being useful as a vocabulary list of sorts, especially in the initial stages of learning either language.

I picked up this book at a local bookstore. It looks pretty nice with a dictionary for very common words. Note that half the dictionary is Japanese to English and the other half is English to Japanese. So most of the information is repeated twice just in opposite ways. It also has some reference tables for stuff like hirigana, katakana, counting numbers, weekdays, months.However I am giving this 3 stars because within the first few minutes of reading the book I found multiple errors for basic things. The word "juuman" is listed as one-million, but it should be one-hundred thousand. The romanji for December is listed as "nigatsu" which you can see right above it is the same as February. The kanji was correct next to it which clearly reads "juunigatsu" so it seems like a bad typo. I am worried if the basics at the front of the book have these mistakes how many other mistakes there might be in the dictionary.