Customer Reviews

Kanji De Manga Volume 4: The Comic Book That Teaches You How To Read And Write Japanese! (v. 4)

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

While I do like these books, and I have found them to be useful in my and my families learning of kanji, they are organized in a completely non-sensical way. At the back of each book, they proclaim that they are useful in studying for the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficieny Test) exams. They are useful.. just not comprehensive.

For example, Volume 1, which has 80 kanji in it to learn, (despite what the paragraph at the back of the book says) is NOT the full list of kanji you would need to learn to pass the first level exam (JLPT4). The JLPT4 test requires 103 kanji at the current time, as well as like 700 vocab words, and basic grammar and listening skills. If you were to just study this book, and nothing else, you would surely fail.

At first I thought maybe the authors had just made an error and meant to say that the books were organized loosely based on the elementary school grade level. However, this is also not true. An example of this is ("hana") which is a grade level 1 kanji taught to first graders, but is in fact in Volume 2.

The only other glaring problem I've found with these books is the lack of any sort of English definition lookup or table of contents. While you can look the kanji up if you know the spelling in kana, being able to look it up in English would've been really nice. However, the books are cheap and fun and pretty easy to use.

Like another reviewer mentioned, it's very difficult to read on the Kindle. Putting it in landscape mode makes it worse. I don't see myself going through this book. I feel like I've wasted $8. Pay the extra $2 and get the paperback. I give it 4 stars for content, but 1 star for readability on the Kindle.

I own all of the books in the series. I wouldn't consider them the best in terms of teaching, but they're fun to look at and fit right in my laptop bag without adding much weight, so I find myself using them a lot and therefore learning a lot too. These books are a great example of a user-friendly experience.

I ordered a sample for my Kindle 2 today and must say that opening the book on the reader was a disappointing experience.

Even though the "change font size" option is enabled for this book, performing the trick has no effect. You see, all the content that seems most interesting is in reality scanned bitmap images and sadly way too small to reveal any of the important details.

Fortunately you can have a sample and see before you buy .... thank you Amazon ;-)