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English-Japanese Knitting Dictionary

  The nice people at Kinokuniya's in Little Tokyo agreed to order this book without having me commit to buying it. I'd been curious about this dictionary for a while but couldn't bring myself to part with the equivalent of 10,000 yen without seeing it first. And a good thing that was indeed. When I finally got to examine a copy of the English-Japanese Knitting Dictionary, it definitely was not what I had expected. I had hoped for a dictionary that included a lot of visuals along with translations of knitting terms, and one that would be equally useful to Japanese and English speakers. As it turns out, the visuals are scarce and a lot of entries are textual explanations of words in the same language, with only part of the entries giving translations from one language to the other. When I examined the book I was a little under the whether and probably not at my most alert, but my guess is that this dictionary will be most useful to Japanese speakers who are trying to decipher knitting instructions in English and not the other way around.

Also, when I first converted the yen price to dollars, I must have made a mistake because I was expecting the book to cost $80 (already a hefty sum for one book), but the price is actually $120! Now, I would have bought it at $20; I would have thought about it twice at $30, but at $120, I really didn't have to think.

Unfortunately I don't have pictures to show you, so this is probably not a very useful review as there is always a lot of subjectivity in making this kind of judgement, but I thought I'd share all the same.

日英最新ニット用語辞典
2006/12/20
510 pages
ISBN-10: 4881220853
ISBN-13: 978-4881220856

Comments

I decided to take a chance, and I ordered this dictionary from amazon.co.jp. I was very disappointed when it arrived. It's beautifully presented, but not at all what I was looking for. I ended up selling it, but I took a big loss. Live and learn, I guess.

Have you seen this knitalong:
http://www.knittingjapanesewannabees.blogspot.com/

It looks like a good resource for Japanese knitting. I just joined.