Customer Reviews

Katakana Gambatte (The Gambatte! series)

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Having learned hiragana from the brilliant James Heisig's book, I was happy to see in the review that this book claims to use the same "mnemonics" method of helping memorise the shapes of katakana characters . Indeed, characters in this book are superimposed over pictures. However, in nearly all cases the pictures have very little to do with what the character looks like (imagine a picture of a person twisted in a very bizzarre way that stands for "centurion" (SE)).

Practice examples are interesting to read as they give tidbits of japanese culture, but they all imply the knowledge of characters that have not been covered yet, making following them extremely painful, and there are not enough of them at all.

Rather than taking a character apart and seeing what parts it consists of, the book just lists them in alphabetical (a-ka-sa-ta) order without trying to find any kind of relation between them.

You are definitely better off waiting for Heisig's katakana book

This book is not worth the time or money. It teaches you how to write the letters, but provides no practice except for reading animal sounds, a snakes and ladders game, and a word search. Also, it gives culture notes, but uses words that are comprised of katakana characters you haven't learned yet. A much better and fantastic book is Japanese Kana Workbook by P.G. O'Neill