Happiness is books. I’m sure of it.
While browsing my school library, I discovered this book and fell in love with it (and thus now have my own copy. Thank-you Amazon!):
A Dictionary of Japanese Idioms by William de Lange. (ISBN 1-891640-24-0).
I highly reccomend it to anybody studying Japanese (and can read hirigana and katakana fluently, this book doesn’t use romaji.) and wants to expand their sentences and vocabulary. The book uses red fonts to make the entries stand out and is easy to read. Better yet, it lists entries for phrases that range from elegant, to colloquial, to obsolete and vulgar. Furigana for all of the kanji listed is also a plus.
As someone who’s definitely stopped reading one of her manga more than once to go ‘huh? what does that mean?’ – this book is a wonderful reference.
One of the fun entries:
音ã«èžã（ãã«ãã）ne ni kiku; elegant – “listen to rumors; lend rumor the ear”; idiomatic equivalent – “heard sth on the grapevine”
