Customer Reviews

A Japanese Reader: Graded Lessons for Mastering the Written Language (Tuttle Language Library)

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Although the contents of many of the lessons seem to echo WWII era sensibilities, this petite volume (originally published in 1962) is absolutely overflowing with high quality material for the serious student of Japanese. In a very brief 250 pages, Mr. Miller whisks us from the rudiments of the Japanese writing system (hiragana and katakana) all the way through to dense and highly advanced excerpts from newspapers and classic Japanese novels. The book is effectively split into two distinct sections. Starting at the "front" of the book are detailed English notes and vocabularies for each lesson; beginning at the "back" of the book and working inward are the original Japanese language texts. The introductory chapters follow Samuel E. Martin's "Essential Japanese" and consist largely of standard grammatical sentence patterns. As the lessons progress in difficulty the texts move to fairy tales, conversations, and eventually to unabridged native texts. The pace of the book is absolutely blistering and all but the most motivated students will be left gasping for breath. For the serious scholar, however, this is a classic. They truly don't make them like this anymore

This book was first printed in 1962, and it really shows, with many examples of old-style orthography and few examples that will be useful to modern students. The book progresses from the fundamentals of the writing system to "Liberalization Plans in Foreign Trade Exchange" and "The Forms of T'ang Poetry" in less than two hundred pages, leaving little room for explanation. As a result, this book might be a useful textbook within the context of an advanced class, but it's not of much use to students studying on their own. It's also worth noting that nearly all of my Japanese books, including everything from novels to popular texts on psychology, are easier than even the 'intermediate' articles in this reader; this book is more liable to scare off students (even relatively advanced ones) than to provide either education or interesting reading materials.

This is an excellent primer on written Japanese, but it is not for the fainthearted! It is true that it is a bit dated (a lot of stuff from the fifties included) but it covers the field of written Japanese extensively in an extremely small amount of space. If (like me) you took up Japanese after you had already learned to read Chinese, you'll probably find this book a useful way to jump into reading while avoiding going through the basics of the writing system all over again.

The book also covers a lot of details on the writing system (proper names, furigana principals, pre-1945 standard usage) that you can spend a lot of time looking for in other books, often to no avail. If you're really serious about getting into reading Japanese, it's a good book to work with, but be warned - it moves along at a vicious pace.

The first thing you have to ask yourself before picking up "A Japanese Reader", is just how serious are you about reading Japanese? If all you want is to be able to whip through some manga, then this isn't the book for you. If want to be able to handle a Japanese newspaper, or read Kawabata Yasunari and Mishima Yukio in their original language, then this is going to be a tool that will help get you there.

Roy Miller's book is definitely university-level study, and is academic in nature. He references Florence Sakade's classic "Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese", and this book really works best when the two are used in conjunction. He gives Sakada numbers for much of the new kanji when it is introduced, so the reader can reference and practice the unfamiliar characters. .

The range of articles goes from the very basic level, with reading practice for hiragana and katakana, and works up to the very advanced level, such as doing academic research in Japanese. In the introduction, Miller states that he assumes most students learning Japanese to that level will be interested in Japanese culture as well, and all of the articles are Japan-themed. It starts to get serious around the Elementary level, with articles such as "The essence of the Bunraku puppet theater" and "Genre painting of the 16th and 17th centuries". The real fun begins with the Advanced:Fiction section, where the student tackles literary masterpieces like Mishima's "The Sound of Waves", Kawabata's "Snow Country" and Tanizaki's "The Makioka Sisters". The Advanced:Non-Fiction section will challenge almost any Japanese learner, and is representative of true fluency. Articles on finance, politics and T'ang poetry are typical.

The main complaint with "The Japanese Reader" is that it is outdated, and this is true. The book comes from a different, more demanding period and that style is thick and heavy, different from a more modern "user-friendly" style of education However, that can be overcome. To me, the real problem lies in its length. This should really be a series of graded readers, rather than a single book. Either you have a high level of ability meaning the earlier beginner lessons are unnecessary, or you are at an earlier stage, unable to make use of the majority of Miller's lessons. I have found that it is not a book to be read straight through, but to be studied, reading the same sections over and over again until mastered, then put aside to be picked up again when that level is reached.

This is something really lacking in Japanese studies. This same style of graded reader would be an absolute must if it were split into three or more volumes, each one providing several examples at the appropriate level. However, this necessary reference does not exist, and "A Japanese Reader" is one of the few, if not the only, Japanese readers that does graded reading exercises.

This book was written in the late 1950's and shows its age slightly in both the choice of selections and in its pedagogical style; however, I found the latter portions to be a valuable resource for learning to read Japanese works written in the "interstitial" period after WWII, but before the "modern" style took complete hold in Japanese literature. As such, many archaic kan'ji and out-of-use phrases are present in the cited works; however, it is important for the student of Japanese literature to have exposure to these forms in addition to the modern style.

I have been studying Japanese for over ten years now and of all the books I own in and on the language, this is by far the most outdated and least user-friendly. I definitely agree with previous reviews that point out that the pace from basic sentences along the lines of "I like French movies" to articles on unglazed pottery and explanations on capitalism makes for daunting, if not defeating, study.

The texts themselves, while interesting to the dedicated student, are rather dry and full of archaic terms that the general Japanese person would either not use or would have trouble recognizing in a text without the appropriate furigana. Without sound previous knowledge of Japanese, it should be difficult for the average learner to estimate which words are really worth memorizing and which ones one might never encounter again outside of this reader.

The greatest drawback, however, is that this "reader" is unreadable without the help of a good Japanese dictionary. Only words in Kanji (with the *occasional* kana exception) are listed in the glossary accompanying each chapter, and in later lessons even some of those terms (which are rather difficult, by all accounts) do no longer make it into the vocabulary lists which leaves the reader to his own devices for figuring out reading and meaning. (And not having a rather technical dictionary, some of these terms cannot be found in more general Japanese-English dictionaries).

All in all, I really wish Tuttle would update and expand on what initially was a great idea. Obviously, every serious student of Japanese should eventually be able to read the texts presented in this volume, but the road to "mastering the language" is not made easier by using this book.

I gave this book 3 stars because it is a great concept and filled with material - however it is so outdated that it should simply not be used by the beginner/intermediate level student.

As previous reviewers said, this book is filled with archaic terms. Some of the vocabulary in this book is simply an old-fashioned form of modern commonly used words. I would worry about using this book to study vocabulary when I'm sure there is much more important, more modern vocabulary I should be learning.

I bought this reader because there are very few similar books out there - readers are scarce to begin with, and this one seemed so comprehensive. I thought I could get passed the fact that it was outdated - I mean, English wasn't so different in the 1960s. But it turns out Japanese was, and even the simple texts are filled with terms I won't need to know until I'm far more advanced - if ever. I wish I had saved my money and bought something more modern.

I don't know why Tuttle continue to publish this book, when a more updated version would be relatively easy to make. The only people who should buy this book are very advanced learners, who are just looking for reading practice. And if that's the case, a Japanese novel would work just as well.

Although it is true that some of the material in this book is old (conversations about rotary telephones), my most serious complaint lies elsewhere and has to do with the fonts used in the printing. When the book was reprinted, a smaller format was chosen which means that the kanji are very small and difficult to read. In the advanced section, there are newspaper articles where the print is so tiny it becomes unreadable. It is almost impossible to count the strokes in the characters to look them up in a dictionary. In short, you need a magnifying glass to use this book once you get out of the elementary section. That is a pity. Learning Japanese is great but not at the expense of one's eyesight.

One of the problems of someone like me, and probably you, is finding a Japanese reader that wasn't written over 40 years ago!

The Japanese government established a standard set of Kanji, around 2,000 in 1981 (? not positive about the date) so anything written much more than 20 years ago will contain Kanji that you won't find in a dictionary, and that are not used.

Also, not only are the Kanji no longer used but the expressions are antiquated.

So a suggestion for an alternative? I don't know, someone tell me...I'm still looking...

The above review said it best: "The pace of the book is absolutely blistering and all but the most motivated students will be left gasping for breath. For the serious scholar, however, this is a classic." This reader has been invaluable to me, although its usefulness is limited without a copy of Samuel E. Martin's 'Essential Japanese' and a Kanji guide using the Sakade numbering. I'd recommend a good dictionary or two. Also, as mentioned in other reviews, the style is a bit old-fashioned. And it should be added that native Japanese friends have commented to me that some of the excerpts are difficult even for them.