Jack Halpern, Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary Reviews

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Good Points: Well-presented, nice layout, nice paper and fonts.
Lots of good examples of idiomatic Japanese.
Some guidance as to the commonness of some characters - but only in terms of official figures for newspapers and school curriculum, not for real life.

Bad Points: Totally idiotic and occasionally illogical way of organising characters which ignores the correct and logical definition of strokes: the radicals are simply and unhelpfully wrong in many cases, because they have been split.
Too many useless characters in (for names and plants) and some pretty useful ones missing.
It's a bit of disappointment in terms of content, but not entirely useless.

General comments: Jack Halpern, Kodansha Kanji Learner's Dictionary - I got the older leatherbound edition. The first thing you notice with this book is its Japaneseness - the print quality, down to the nice texture of the paper, the nice colours of the paper and fonts. The layout is ok, it could be better, but it's certainly not bad.

The problem with this dictionary - and it's a big problem - is that the author has deliberately ignored the normal way of counting the radicals.

(You'll have to imagine the accents on top of the vowels)
e.g.: the character KU/aku/akeru/sora/kara... (as in air/space/open...)

The character is made up of a five-stroke radical on the top ("roku") with its 3-stroke phonic part underneath ("ko").

Consequently, you can spend absolutely ages getting neck-ache searching for it, using his not so wonderful and not so original SKIP system, and get very frustrated to find that it's listed in the wrong place.

This character should be called a (2)4-3, instead, because the author thinks he knows better, it's a (2)2-5.

He has split the radical.

Throughout the book, this is done in an arbitrary fashion, which only leads to confusion, as no oriental (never mind Japanese speaker) can use or follow this silly book as it makes no sense to them.
You will find that this arrogant approach by the author can cause conflict with your studies as this book is the only one in common circulation which uses this bastardised system.

On top of that, the author has the pretentiousness and gall to make a big thing out of copyrighting and trademarking his silly system.
Let me just say that nobody is going to steal your ideas Jack - they're utter twaddle.
The idea of searching in this way (and dividing characters into vertical and horizontal groups, etc...) is not especially radical or new either - you can see it in plenty other books and without the fanfare; so I doubt any patents will hold much water.
Basically, the groups are not entirely correct, and this quasi-autistic ordering system is fundamentally flawed; (I speak as a high-functioning autistic).

Another gripe is the insistance of putting in characters for personal names, and abstruse names of plants. I can see it's nice to have, but I think it's better off in an appendix.

I think a good section of appendices to help you find names for things in useful categories like science and engineering, politics, etc., might be useful.
I appreciate it's a dictionary to help assist the understanding of the meaning of sinoglyphs, but most people who use it are going to want more than that from it.

It is a shame, as the quality of the presentation is probably among the highest of any dictionary of anything anywhere. The content, however, is flawed. It doesn't make it an unwise purchase though. It does help you get to grips with the spectrum of meaning of characters and the idiomatic usage of nipponic verbs and some impressive phrases like "sekinin o ninau". But if you do get it, don't bother with the SKIP system, because the radicals have been split and reordered in an illogical way, and it will confuse you. If the radicals had not been adulterated this would be a top-class book.
For me, I used it on my Japanese degree with a trusty old Collins Shubun dictionary and a pocket dictionary from Japan.