General Details
Title: 小学生のためのレインボー和英辞典 (The Rainbow Japanese-English Dictionary)
Volumes: 1
Language: Japanese
Publisher: Gakken
Year: 1990
Pages: 272
The 小学生のためのレインボー和英辞典 (literally: The Rainbow Japanese English Dictionary for Elementary School Students) is a small, but immensely colorful and cute bilingual dictionary. According to the introductory material, it includes 2,535 main entries and approximately 3,400 total words. There are a large number of themed guides to conversation ("Various Greetings") and details ("Fish", "Insects", etc).
Each entry presents the headword in kana and, where applicable, kanji and then provides a simple English definition. Many entries are accompanied by a sample phrase or sentence, and 95%+ of them are accompanied by an illustration. There is a katakana guide to pronunciation above the English with the word stress bolded. One thing I particularly like about this dictionary is that it knows its target audience - if I were to ask my kid what word she wanted to look up in a dictionary, I know exactly what sorts of things she would pick: gas, butt, poop... if it's in a Captain Underpants book, it's also in here.
There are a few fun bonus-features in this dictionary. On certain pages, the lower-left-hand corner of the left page features a blue lizard in a baseball hat with the text "Where am I?" - meaning that a smaller version of that blue lizard is hidden somewhere on the two-page spread. In the lower-right-hand corner are a series of images which, in a slowed-down flip-book fashion, tell the story of a family's ill-fated trip to the beach and shark encounter. This is truly the sort of work that all children's dictionaries should aspire to emulate.
Sample Entries
I attempt to look up the same entries in every reference work featured on this site, to allow for a fair comparison: "Saint Louis" and "umbrella." Saint Louis does not appear in this book (which makes sense, given its limited scope and target audience), but "umbrella" appears on page 60:
かさ 傘 an umbrella
