Customer Reviews

Read Real Japanese Essays: Contemporary Writings by Popular Authors 1 free CD included

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

 

 

Once I read the Fiction version in this series, I jumped for the Nonfiction as quickly as possible. This little series is absolutely top-notch for those who have taken advanced Japanese classes. I can't help but repeat myself in this review: "This reader is the one I compare all others to."

It goes above and beyond in every respect. It features enjoyable stories, furigana by every kanji, a dictionary wherein every term is listed, a line-by-line "literal" explanation, and in the back of the book the grammar and cultural points of each line is discussed in depth. And as icing on the cake, there's a fabulous CD wherein an actress reads each story aloud. How can it get any better than this?

Frankly, I am being spoiled rotten by both of the books in this duo. It's going to be hard to go back to other readers that lack comprehensive dictionaries and feature complex kanji with no furigana.

Still, don't be fooled by all the goodies it gives you -- it's not holding your hand. Furigana is only listed once, forcing you to recall it when the kanji is repeated later in the story. Any new devotees of the Japanese language will probably be bowled over -- it's definitely for the intermediate students, who will benefit most from seeing all of those grammar forms they only previously knew in textbooks.

If you're a student of Japanese, you'll find this reader helpful and fun. It's definitely worth the money -- you're paying for some wonderful features that many other readers skimp on. I suggest getting the Fiction version of this set as well, as it features all of the same perks.

This is a great book for advanced students. It presents real written Japanese and breaks it down into bite-size segments. Everything you need (except for a note book) is right there. The CD is an excellent aid for listening. No dry reading and grammar points. I find it is best to make photocopies of the section you are working through so you can lay it flat (the hadrcover version won't always stay open). You can also increase the font size and make notes whithout marking up the book (I'm a nitpicker).

Best to use the CD with mediaplayer on a computer. This way you can break the tracks down and focus on the individual sentences, without having to sit through the entire track (big time saver).

You must still work at it though. The best materials in the world do nothing if you don't use them. This book makes language study a little less painful!

For anyone disappointed by the fact that the Japanese language books in the book store are too easy, but Japanese books are too hard, this is the book for you. It's definitely a great tool for students that are interested in gaining more reading comprehension strength while being able to enjoy what they are reading. The length of the essays are short which prevent boredom and since they are written by authors instead of educators they leave you wanting to read more! I love the literal translations on the side that still let me think of what the author is saying instead of telling me what it says! I can't wait to buy the short stories book too!

Kodansha is simply the best publisher of this kind of books. Period. No other publisher gets even close. I have bought almost every title from them, starting with what was called Power Japanese Series at that time, now published again in new editions without the power label.

I have the previous "edition" of this book, but it's actually not at all the same book as this one, since the stuff there is totally different. (Get both!) The major difference is of course the better format of this book. AND THE CD! It's great to have the text read by a professional actress, even if she does like ALL native Japanese talkers do: break the speed limit. Even if I have been listening to spoken Japanese on and off for almost ten years, I still have to repeat and repeat until WORDS start to appear from the machine gun syllables :-)

I am currently engaged in really weird discussions on the net by simply asking "Is Japanese the most difficult language (for English-etc-speaking persons) to learn?" Part of my argument - apart from my own experiences - is found in this particular book. Quoting Janet Ashby:

"""[...] Yet Japanese remains a deeply frustrating language to study. So much so that I remember finding it positively encouraging when my Japanese professor remarked one day that it took seven years to learn the language - I had despaired pf ever being able to pick up up a Japanese magazine or newspaper and read it more or less easily.

The problem is not only the kanji barrier, high though that can be for Western learners of Japanese, but also the differences in the spoken and written language and the unfamiliar vocabulary, set expressions, sentence patterns, and even the way of thinking. And despite all the changes in the learning environment over the years, there still aren't many intermediate reading materials available, especially ones that can be used for independent study."""

That's a perfectly honest assessment. Why people get upset by telling them that Japanese is extremely difficult, is really beyond my understanding. I am currently focusing on Mandarin, so I am not ACTIVELY studying Japanese. But if I did, this would be one of the books I would focus on. And also don't forget the companion book "Read Real Japanese Fiction" by Michael Emmerich.

This is one of two books in Kodansha's excellent "Read Real Japanese" series. Whereas the other book, Read Real Japanese Fiction focused on fiction stories by popular modern Japanese authors, this one focuses on non-fiction essays, including some that are about the nuance of the Japanese language itself, so you are learning about Japanese in Japanese.

Basically, any student of Japanese needs both of these books. For a long time there was a dearth of quality Japanese readers. Some, like A Japanese Reader are so dense and academic as to put off all but the most dedicated student. Some, like Mangajin's Basic Japanese Through Comics, are fun to begin with but don't get you very far. The biggest problem has always been that middle ground, that 2-kyu level where you need some help getting over the hump from constructed text and into the real world. Even the previous release from Kodansha, Read Real Japanese, relied too heavily on romaji.

Most of the authors in "Read Real Japanese Essays" will be familiar to anyone who reads Japanese literature, like Murakami Haruki (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) Yoshimoto Banana (Kitchen) Ogawa Yoko (The _Professor's Beloved Equation). Some of them are more obscure, like short-story author Mitsuyo or poet/novelist Machida Kou. Each author is given a short biography, and there is a nice breadth of style and subject. Probably my favorite essay was Machida's, where he showed how important the ~masu, ~da and ~de aru sentence endings were in Japanese by putting the lyrics to the Sex Pistols' Anarchy In The U.K. in polite ~masu form. Mitsuyo's essay on why men shouldn't cook was also very funny.

The eight essays are:

Murakami Haruki - Little White Lies
Sakai Junko - Admonishing Young People in Trains
Kakuta Mitsuyo - On Cooking
Yoshimoto Banana - On Beauty
Machida Kou - No Matter How he Writes, a Creep is Still a Creep
Ogawa Yoko - Concerning "The Professor's Beloved Equation"
Hirano Keiichiro - Thoughts on Mutability
Levy Hideo - Living in the Land of the Bungakusha

All of the essays are challenging and interesting. The pages are split with the original Japanese on the right, and a break-down translation on the left. Kanji are given with hiragana readings only once, which force you to learn the reading rather than rely on the furigana. The end of the book has a dictionary of the intermediate and advanced words for you to refer to.

I also really enjoyed having the CD to listen to while reading through the essays. It sets a challenging pace, being read at normal speed, and is excellent training for anyone looking to pass a JLPT exam.

I found this book perfect for those who want to read japanese but find it difficult because there are too many unknown kanji. you have the translation to every phrase on the same page. So I highly recommend reading this for intermediate students of japanese and above.

Solid text. Basically serves the purpose I wanted. My only complaint is that the same narrator does all the reading on the cd. It gets really tiring listening to the same person reading all the texts. Would be nice if you could change narrators or have more than one person read each text.

....

I studied the first half of this book with quite a bit of time taken. The second half was admittedly too hard for me. It is almost like level one and two. The first half of the book (about 5 essays) was very educational and beneficial. The book is worth every penny.

I won't repeat what other people have said. I agree 100%. Nobody seemed to mention that audio, although very natural and authentic may be too fast for learners. Absorbing a story at such rate with no pauses and fast reading is very difficult. If you are able to understand spoken Japanese, you can just listen to the radio. I have been ploughing similar products in Chinese, which I bought at [...]. Although, the grammar and vocabulary guides are behind, the stories they select are graded in difficulty, that is deliberately somewhat simplified but leaving it natural and increasingly difficult and more importantly, the audio recordings are slower, clearer, leaving you some time to think, absorb and even repeat and the pauses between sentences are a little bit longer. Like visual information, listening is understood better in smaller portions.

This is something, which is missing in these series, after making a comparison. Alternatively, the recordings could be done with 2 speeds or a copy created with at least short pauses between clauses or sentences.

Having said this, I agree these products are great but there is some for improvement.

These stories are mosty just pointless ramblings. I don't see what qualifies them as literature at all. Their content is no different than what I would hear if I went over to visit my neighbor's and listened to her drone on and on about some unimportant opinion of hers about something or about some unimportant thing that happened to her that day. I don't see why I would buy a book to read such garbage. I don't see why you would either. You could instead go visit a nursing home to hear such similar things. At least at the old folks home you would have a chance that one of the old people would tell you something that taught you something unique about life or showed you some poignant piece of history. But from Reading Real Japanese, you will only get the boring ramblings of some average Joe's who really have nothing fruitful to say about life.

The first story is about some minor lie that author enjoys telling during an interview and some other lies he tells when he writes a book review. So what.

The second is about how another author is annoyed by some students listening to tv shows on their cell phones on the train. She gives her rather shallow ideas about whether the man seated across should have said something to them and about whether she thinks women should (oh, horror of horrors) put on makeup in public or not. Really, if you have an idiot neighbor, go listen to them complain about their day instead of buying this. At the end, she comes to the realization that she was not so different as a teenager and she worries what women are going to be like since many now ride the women only trains and are exposed to a lot of women constantly committing the horror of putting on makeup in public. Certainly, what monsters are these public makeup applicating women going to become? Surely, this terrible practice must be proof that the end days are upon us. God save us from these public makeup applicating bitches. Again. Who gives a crap. There are men, women, children, and animals that are raped, tortured, and/or murdered on our planet everyday and I am supposed to be bothered or care if someone else is bothered because someone is applying makeup while on public transportation? I could really give two sh*ts.

The third one is some other complaining woman droning on about what terrible cooks men are and how none of them care that she is nearly dizzy from hunger as they continue to spend a long time making food that in the end she finds inadequate anyway. I think the author thinks it is a good wrap up at the end when she lets us know that somehow the men's sincere but worthless efforts are endearing. I must say that I do not find the sincere but worthless efforts of this author endearing in the least. Any idiot can be published now, can't they.

The worst or at least the most personally offensive for me is the one by the author who writes about mathematics. She is one of those people who has no math ability herself. One of those people that I wish I would never, ever have to teach math to. She is a mathematical gerbil--someone with the math abilities of a gerbil. One of those people that make me say, "I would rather teach math to a German shepherd," because while it won't learn more math than a math retarded human, at least I can be assured that it will learn to sit properly on command, which is more than can be said for many human students and no one will force me to spend my free time giving the German shepherd pro bono math tutoring that will never have any worthwhile result. This woman, in the typical manner of people who have no understanding of math whatsoever, gushes exuberantly about the wonders of math without ever showing even the slightest understanding of it. She also recites the well known tale of how Gauss foiled his teacher's attempt to assign busy work by quickly adding the numbers from 1-100. She is so stupid that she calls his solution magical. Anyone with intelligence would consider his solution to be clever, perhaps, but to a complete moron, it is magical. It is these types of people that create abominations of movies like "A Beautiful Mind" or "Goodwill Hunting"--yeah, I am talking to you Matt Damon. How do ya like them apples? There might not be anything quite so dreary in literature as the writings of an ignorant person who makes the pretense to know something about a topic of which they have absolutely no understanding. This is the sort of garbage she comes up with about "math geniuses": They are not like ordinary people who have to take mapped roads and must plod past precipices and bogs and wolves and become scratched and bruised to solve a problem, no, they fly up in hot air balloons and ride the wind and glide effortlessly and swiftly to their solution. What a load of garbage. This woman is so dumb she has no qualifications to write about genius or mathematics any more than I do to write about the mechanics of a diesel engine or how to temper chocolate. The difference between her and I is that I know better than to do so.

If you don't have enough stupid acquaintances to keep you in touch with the common folk or if you are yourself one of them, then please read this collection of worthless drivel.