Customer Reviews

Mini First Thousand Words Japanese Internet Linked (Japanese Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
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My wife (Japanese native)and I (Japanese speaking American) purchased this book for our two year old son. We spend 15 minutes with him daily going through the pages. At first he only paid attention to pictures of words he already knew like "boru" (ball) and "hikoki" (airplane), etc. After a few weeks, he has more than tripled his vocabulary. Over Thanks giving, after diner, my family was sitting around and my brother picked up the book. The next thing we knew, it was a fun learning experience for my whole family (all non Japanese speakers). My brother who is 35 has asked us to buy the book for him for christmas.

I'm an engineer for a Japanese company here in the US and I recently began learning Hiragana and Katakana. This book is fantastic to begin building your vocabulary. The pages are set up by topic and have the romanji and either hiragana or katakana. This book has no Kanji! I prefer that at the beginning of my learning, I see no Kanji. It is just too confusing!

I also have a three-year-old son that has looked at this book also. I'm simply amazed at how quickly he has picked up everything that I've read to him. Each word has a picture and he quickly recognizes it. He certainly can't read either the Japanese or English, but he can pick up the language very easily!

This a great addition to either a children's library or the new Japanese student's.

We are Japanese Americans, and we love using this book to teach our children Japanese. We all know that most children love reading picture books. The drawings in this book are very cute. Kids love reading this book and they think it is a story book. Little do they know that they are actually learning Japanese!!

We also like to use this book to teach adult students Japanese. Like the saying "pictures worth thousand words", the grown-ups also find the classes interesting when using material like this one.

We have got 2 copies and will order more for our students.

This book was really good for learning simple Japanese words. I really enjoyed it and I learned a lot from it. It sets out th kana so you can learn from them and distinguish them. My complaints were that it does give you the exact English word for the Japanese word. It simply gives you a picture and leaves it up to you to speulate what the word actually means. Also, it doesn't give you phrases or anything, so the book is kind of useless if you are really looking for something to teach you how to communicate in Japanese. But I don't believe that was the intent of the book, so I letting those of you know to not buy this to learn how to communicate. Only to learn words. But it is a very entertaining book and I reccomend it.

I like the series and I'm not at all sorry that I bought the book. However ... reviewers (on the UK site)have already referred to the poor proof reading. Now I am an almost complete beginner in Japanese, but it wasn't ten minutes before I started finding lots more mistakes. It would be silly to list them, but sometimes labels are quite wrong; in one case two pictures side-by-side have been given the same caption by mistake. You might take the view that a dozen or so mistakes in a thousand is not too bad a failure rate. You might, on the other hand, like to look at Marlene Goodman's 'Let's Learn Japanese Picture Dictionary' which has the same format. I've not yet received my copy of that from the States (so can't vouch for its accuracy) but I understand that it also gives the kanji. You may find that useful.

If you are completely new to the series, it is perhaps also worth saying that of course simple children's-story-book pictures do not in themselves make the language any easier. There is a trade-off: some people will find that the 'everything you can see here on the farm' approach is not a good way to learn ... it's obviously not at all systematic. Against that, lots of reviews (here and elsewhere) suggest that it works very well for young children. It's cheap, cheerful, good fun - a way of adding vocabulary - worth buying, I think ... providing that you can get by without the Japanese for 'hedgehog'! (Perhaps the slips do not occur in the US version, but I'd guess the artwork is the same.)

I love this book but I have to say I'm glad I already speak Japanese because there are a lot of typos and the hiragana doesn't even match the romaji in some cases where it's supposed to be translating it. Also there's a page near the back where all the Hiragana looks pixelated and crappy. Again, I really like this book, but now I'm going to have to write corrections on it for when my brother uses it, which is kinda disappointing. All in all I'm still glad I bought it but I'm also surprised it was published with such obvious errors.

I have learned most of the 1,00 words in this book over a short period of time. It is very helpful if you want to learn Japanese.