Customer Reviews

Schaum's Outline of Japanese Vocabulary

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3 star:		(1)
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The authors of this textbook had what seems like a pretty good idea. They developed a series of Japanese language sentences, each followed by the corresponding English text on the line below. I bought this book after seeing a copy in the local library, thinking that it would be good for practicing reading in Japanese. Using a piece of thick paper, I would shield the English translation and just read the Japanese, and then move the paper to reveal the English translation.
However, someone had the dumb idea of putting much of the Japanese text in bold characters, to emphasize new terms as they are introduced. The kanji characters are small to begin with, and this has the effect of making many of the kanji characters unreadable, as all of the little lines that make up the characters merge and blur together. This gets to be very annoying. If the authors wanted to emphasize certain characters, it would have been better to underline them, rather than to put them in bold text.
Interestingly, I have two other Japanese textbooks, the Minna no Nihongo series, which teach kanji, where the authors made the same mistake, putting newly introduced tiny kanji in bold characters, so that they are difficult to read, but the blurring effect is less pronounced, since the book is printed on better paper than the Schaum's Outline books.
I think that native Japanese people are so used to reading kanji that they don't even notice this kind of detail. They can recognize the kanji at a glance, no matter how blurry they are.
The other reasons I can't give this book a very high rating are 1) there are a number of minor mistakes in the English translations and 2) the whole premise of the book is not very imaginative. As the other reviewer said, it's really much too difficult for a beginner, so to whom is the book directed? For someone like me, who has completed a number of Japanese courses (Berlitz, Pimsleur, Learn in Your Car, Japanese for Everyone) over many years of effort and who can read a few hundred kanji but who has never lived in Japan for more than a few weeks, the level of this book is just about right for reading practice, but the reading is proving to be frustrating because I can't see a lot of the characters. If I didn't know this material already, I would never be able to learn it from such a scattershot approach as these authors are taking.
By the way, if you really want to learn Japanese thoroughly, I highly recommend the textbook, Japanese for Everyone. It's very difficult, but it teaches the grammar, which is the most difficult part of Japanese, systematically and thoroughly. Each chapter builds on the ones before it, and the authors are careful not to introduce too much new vocabulary too quickly.

I ordered this with high hopes to learn some japanese, but this book is just too difficult. It may be good if you already know at least some rudimentary japanese, but not for beginners. I recommend going to the bookstore instead for buying books like these. you'll get a better idea of what you're buying.