Time to toss the Kanji Dictionary

I remember buying this book back in 1996, when I was in my first year of studying Japanese. I've always thought of it as a decent guide -- potentially very useful -- so I've held onto it these past 25 years.

Recently, though, I've come to a different realization. This thing is garbage. I should have thrown it out years ago.

Here are five reasons why:

1. The author mixes up the 常用漢字 according to his own prerogatives rather than following any Japanese class curriculum (such as the order used in Japanese elementary schools). So while #14 曜 is undoubtedly a great kanji to learn early on (as the author says, so you can write the days of the week), there's no reason why you should wait until #890 to learn 忙. 忙しい (busy) is a very hepful word that's worth learning early on.
   
   
2. The example vocabulary is too esoteric to be useful. The example words for how to use #671 焼 are 焼き鳥 yakitori (very useful) but also 焼死, which is "death by fire." That's interesting, but I've never had occasion to use that, and I'd have been better off learning something useful.
   
   
3. The kanji look up section in the back reflects the pre-smartphone way to look up kanji. This book was originally written in 1973, and this is the way we did things before optical character recognition apps: when you see a kanji you don't recognize, count the strokes, and look it up by either the radical (which you probably haven't learned yet) or the number of strokes. And all to often, what you think is a 12-stroke kanji turns out to be only 11, and you've just wasted 15 minutes looking in the wrong section.
   
   These days, looking up kanji is waaaay easier. Download the app, use the camera, and boom. It will display the translation for the kanji you're looking at. I swear I was born 20 years too early -- this kind of thing would have saved so many hours of my life....
   
   
4. This is a minor point, but it's important to me because I also spent time learning Chinese. I thought using this dictionary would useful to cross-reference the Chinese to the Japanese I'd already learned, but it didn't work out that way because the Chinese romanizations use the Wade-Giles system, not pinyin. So instead of 左 being "zuo," it's "tso." Minor difference, sure, but when the entire book is like that, it just makes for more work than it's worth.
   
   
5. The book has only the 1,945 kanji prescribed by the 1981 常用漢字 listing (plus 55 more for names), not the 2010 listing of 2,136. So while 2,000 kanji sounds impressive, it's not current.

So now, 25 years after I bought it, and after trucking it around to all the places I've lived during those years, and having finished a full year in Japan, I can authoritatively say this book has not been helpful.

A realization that's better late than never, but little consolation.