Customer Reviews

Japanese: The Written Language: Part 1, Volume 1: Katakana (Includes 40 sheet tracing pad)

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Japanese: The Written Language, an updated version of Jorden's older Reading Japanese book. It has languished in a field test edition for years, but at last the final version of the book is starting slowly to come out.

This book, as the name implies, is 123 pages (plus an associated workbook) devoted entirely to katakana, the syllabery used in Japanese primarily to represent foreign loan words. The first thing that may strike the purchaser is the length of the book in comparison to the subject covered. Many Japanese courses deal with katakana by handing out a table to their students and asking them to memorize it within a week, give a quiz, and then assume the students have mastered them after that. The result is people who have been studying Japanese for years but still cannot reliably read items written in katakana.

The subject of this book is not simply acquiring knowledge of the symbols, but developing a true *reading* knowledge of katakana. Knowing how a single symbol is pronounced (or knowing the romanized equivalent) does you no good if you cannot read words that contain the symbol. In addition to introducing the symbols, the book spends a great deal of time teaching the student to convert foreign words to Japanese, and vice versa. Armed with this knowledge, the student can read a good amount of authentic material such as menus and catalogs. (For those readers who are interested in video games, an enormous amount of material in all kinds of video games are written in katakana.)

This last point also explains why katakana are covered before hiragana. Much more authentic Japanese can be read with only katakana than with only hiragana.

Given the subject of the book, it does not directly deal with the pronunciation of Japanese. It is correlated with the book Japanese: The Spoken Language that covers the topic in more depth, and the learner is assumed to already have some knowledge of pronunciation and the spoken language. However, audio files are available on the web for every example in the book so that the sounds of the words can be heard spoken by a native speaker. The book utilizes the same style of romanization that is used in JSL -- some people may be unfamiliar with the standard type of romanization used in Japan that contains such syllables as "si" and "tu", but it should always be remembered that no romanization system can teach pronunciation on its own. Even if Hepburn romanization were used in the book (and so the syllables were written "shi" and "tsu"), that still would not enable you to pronounce the syllables correctly without hearing them spoken. (If you are interested in why the author has chosen this kind of romanization, the introduction to JSL explains it.)

My chief complaint with this book is the price; at some point in the future when JWL is completed, hopefully a single volume will be published that is more economical. For those working on a tighter budget, the field test JWL or even the older Reading Japanese are fairly good as well, and also contain hiragana and some kanji practice. But this is a highly recommended book for anyone going to Japan with no knowledge of the writing system, or for someone who is starting the long process of learning to read Japanese.

(One last note -- this book was developed at Ohio State University primarily to fit in with the JSL series; as was stated above. In OSU's program, students begin studying this book after 6 weeks of study (roughly after lesson 3 of JSL); this is not intended as an introduction to the Japanese language.)

This product only has Katakana in it! There is a product that looks the same, but has Kanji instead. BE CAREFUL! It comes with an extra practice pad, which is nice.

I was really impressed with how quickly my order arrived, even though I only used standard shipping. Furthermore, the book was in great condition and was exactly what I was expecting when I ordered it.

Having studied Japanese for five years under three native speaking teachers, I can assure you that buying this book is the biggest mistake possible if you want to learn the Japanese. It is riddled with factual errors and is an overall convoluted approach to learning the Japanese writing system. Of the five Japanese textbook series that I have used, this one stands unparalleled as the absolute worst. To list the actual mistakes contained therein would be a gargantuan task that I am not about to begin. Let me give one example, something so elementary that it should stand as representation for the whole:

In a table of the Japanese characters and their pronunciations, the author includes the following as pronunciations: ti, tu, si. These sounds do not exist in Japanese and you will never hear them. They instead are supposed to be chi, tsu, shi. This is a fact that I have not seen misrepresented anywhere else, ever. There is no explanation of the pronunciation of r-based symbols in which the r is supposed to be pronounced as subtle combination of r and l. These mistakes (of which there are more, and more again in Jorden's other textbooks) are then spread throughout the entirety of the book. This drastically alters the sound of the language and you will find yourself quite embarrassed if you go to Japan and try to speak like this.

Do yourself a favor and buy something else.