Customer Reviews

Mangajin's Basic Japanese

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This is a great supplement for those studying Japanese language and culture. Don't expect to pick this up as a first Japanese book, however! In the introduction, the author admits that "Basic Japanese Through Comics" may be a little misleading. It is basic Japanese, but the book assumes that you have studied a year or more in a classroom environment.

With that aside, this is the best resource I have seen for transforming "classroom" Japanese into "natural" Japanese. The book uses popular Japanese manga to smooth out some common errors for Japanese learners. For example, there are two chapters discussing the many uses of "Hai" and one chapter on how to naturally say "anno..."

The manga used is very fun and gives a good cultural insight into daily Japan. No giant robots or magical girls, it is mainly office humor in the same line as "Dilbert." The office humor demonstrates varying levels of polite language, and Mangajin is kind enough to offer a "politeness scale" to show how polite anyone is being in a given setting. This is very useful, as politeness levels is where many English speakers find themselves in trouble in Japan!

This book (there are at least a couple volumes) is great! It's refreshing to find an approach complimentary to the basics one would learn in class, and we find that, just as in every other language, day-to-day speaking is often quite a bit different from the stuff you're taught in the early learning stage. And hey! You're reading comics! How bad can that be?