While we find the information in this book to be helpful and accurate, we feel that you can get the same info (or better info!) from the internet. You don't need this book, though we will admit that it's nice having it all in one place in a nicely bound book.

Positives:

• It has some rather esoteric knitting languages such as Estonian and Norwegian!
• It does have the same words sorted by the English and sorted by the foreign languages in alpha order (except Japanese)
• It is bound and is accurate

Negatives:

• The Japanese characters are poorly reproduced. You can recognize them, but we think that for a professional book, they should have used a Japanese font, instead of doing a cheap cut/paste. Some characters lost a bit of detail in the reproduction.
• While we understand that this is not a book about Japanese knitting, they really weenied and gave you very little info. For example, they tell you that the Japanese needle sizes are different from the American ones. However, they don't tell you the translation! Telling you to swatch first is obvious, please give us the info!
• There's very little context to the translations. They show you the character that means ""pattern""...but they aren't specific about the fact that they mean stitch pattern, not project pattern. Ok...if you study Japanese patterns, it'll probably be obvious that there are usually 2 stitch patterns and that the character represents the stitch pattern...but still.
• We almost think that with such a superficial, useless amount of info, they should have just left it out, rather than do a less than thorough treatment of the subject. For other languages, we felt that the translation would assist you to do the patterns. But for the Japanese, we feel that you need other aids, not just this book.

GooseRating: only 5 of 10 happy honks...it gets a 5 for being accurate, but not terribly helpful or unique compared to other sources of info