foreign languages

I have been using this book in my Japanese classes for the past four years, and it's been great. There are a few advanced words I have found in newspapers that are not in this dictionary, but they are few. Almost any word you would want for general purposes is available in this dictionary, which is easily searchable by anyone. Another great feature of this dictionary is the inclusion of many alternatives to English loan-words, excellent for those who prefer to avoid them. I ordered the NTC New Character Dictionary to use with this one. I would also recommend a character dictionary for anyone, since being able to look up Kanji is important, but this is the book that every Japanese student should carry around with them.

This is a nice tool for the beginner of Japanese; the dictionary guide at the start discusses areas of pronunciations and word division that most Japanese-English or English-Japanese dictionaries leave out. It's table of hiragana and katakana is also good for those that have not yet learned those syllabaries (although the archaic hiragana and katakana for the syllables "wi" and "we" were left out, as well as some katakana, such as "tse" and "tso").
The English-Japanese section, being larger, has just about any word that you would want to look up, including regular dictionary terms like "Middle Ages" (chuusei), "yin and yang" (in to yoo/on to yoo), and xylophone (mokkin) that you might have trouble finding in another dictionary.
The Japanese-English section, although smaller and with entries written in roomaji (Roman alphabet), includes a lot of terms existing only in Japanese, such as chaseki (seat at a tea ceremony), irogami (colored origami paper), and jinja (Shinto shrine).
Both sections have accompaning kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese) and/or kana with the entires.
There is an abundance of foreign borrowed words (i.e. akusento, "accent"), but this dictionary should prove useful in building vocabulary and finding the kanji for a word.

This dictionary is great for anyone in need of a Jap-Eng Eng-Jap dictionary. I was skeptical of buying this, as I had never bought a dictionary from Random House before (I usually go for Oxford, sometimes Webster). But all in all, a good product. I'd reccomend it.