Customer Reviews

Japanese Script (Teach Yourself Beginner's Script Series)

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For it's price this book is a good find. There were some problems regarding pronouncation. Since the book is written by a British author American readers may be confused by the sounds of the hiragana.
Example:
あ= a, as in hat
え= e, as in end
い= i, as in hit
う= u, as in blue
お= o, as in hot

the two confusing ones are い and お. They should be pronounced like "ee" and "oh", respectively. The examples given, hit and hot make american readers give い the "eh" sound and お the "aw" sound, which is wrong. But if you can get past that, its actually a well written book.

It is difficult to think of a better introduction to learning Kanji. First lessons start with pictures on which certain charasters are based. Then the real characters are presented. The student is offered to establish a link between a picture and the corresponding character. It is a good stimulating exercise which makes the student pay attention to the elements of a certain character on one hand and prerares him to discover its meaning on the other. The lessons are supplied with exercises that help remember the material and also refresh what was learnt in the previous lesson. The exercises are very practical and present real language situations, e.g. to work with Japanese calendar, ads, warnings, notices, etc. The inroduction to kana is built on associations as well. However, I think it is slightly condensed. For those who are interested in learning Kana using picture mnemonics I would recommend Kana Pictographics by M.Rowley. Ohterwise, H. Gilhooly did a great job on creating this book. I just regret that the number of the Kanji introduced is only about fifty. This book is defenitely designed to maintain the student's interest to the language and gives sufficient knowledge to continue studying Japanese.

If you want to learn Kanji, this is a very good choice to start with. The book is written simply, by and established author, and leads you well through many simple kanji, including a nice set of general rules for stroke order.

There are only a single real problem I found with this book. For one thing, the author does not always introduce the names of the kanji when she presents them--given, there is an index in the back, but I would like to not have to flip back and forth quite so often. This was my major concern with the book; if you want to have speaking ability with these new kanji you must learn how to say their names.

Other than this, I believe this is a good choice of book if you are looking to learn kanji; even some of the pictoral mnemonics (I need a way to help me remember how to spell that! *grins*) were helpful, though some didn't seem to be very well-linked unless you looked them over quite carefully.

So to you I say--nihongo gambatte!

~KeViN!

I used this book eight years ago to learn some kanji before moving to Japan. I had gotten it from the library and renewed it a couple times. The explanations and pictures are so clear and really helped me recognize dozens of kanji. I remember laughing at the time that the characters for university mean "big study." Now that my husband is indulging me and learning Japanese, I bought this book for him, and he is impressed that he is actually remembering some characters now. The only downside to the book, IMO, is that the pronunciation of the characters isn't always introduced right away. If I'm learning what a character means, I want to know how to say it, too. (They do give the pronunciations but not until later chapters.)

If you are poor and cannot afford Rosetta Stone, then this book is for you. And for me, since at one point I was too poor to afford Rosetta Stone. It is very informative and very well thought out.

I found the book very interesting. The idiograph was developed showning graphically. The idograph is very interesting as it was other than the Latin and Indian Sanskrit. One does not learn the words but the figure or script about 2000 of them to have a command of the language. It is explained in the book very explicitly and graphically.

this isn't as much of a review as a warning; the pronunciations throughout the book are botched for the most part. so if you are first learning your hiragana / katakana, i would not recommend beginning with this book or else you will end up quite confused later on when you learn the actual pronunciations.

for example, on page 21:
(kanji) bamboo = take. (pronounced a of "mat", and e of "end").

my knowledge of japanese is about as basic as it gets, and yet even i know this is wrong. it should be in fact pronounced a bit more similarly to "tah-kay".

other than that, it's been quite helpful resource. just do your best not to commit the erroneous pronunciations to memory, because they are an integral building block to japanese.

This book is not very useful, since it introduces the script's characters but contains only a minimum of texts to exercise them. For those who already know Chinese script, the chapters about Kanji are absolutely not interesting, and for those who have never seen a Kanji before, it is almost equally useless with all the effort to present everything in nice pictures. Advanced learners will find that linking characters to pictures is an absolutely ridiculous method once you want to learn a few thousands of them. Furthermore, I expected that this book would in some way relate to the volume "Teach yourself Japanese", but that is not the case.
Everyone who really wants to learn Japanese, better find something else.