Tuttle Concise Japanese Dictionary

Difficulty:  ☠ ☠

Rating:  ✫ ✫ ✫ ✫

It is very easy to find yourself asking “In this day of internet and smart phone apps… Would I really need a dictionary around?” Let me answer that one for you… You need a dictionary around! 9 times out of 10 you may get away with using the apps, but that 10th time you find yourself scrambling for a word, you find yourself being very thankful for having this one on your shelf.

Reasons I like the Tuttle one? It’s concise…. (it’s in the name!) It’s organized by the English alphabet in both cases, and it has almost always had the word I was looking for! Good enough for me! Good enough for you! Enjoy!

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Spark Charts Japanese Vocabulary

Difficulty:

Rating:  ✫ ✫ ✫ ✫ ✫

This is a chart I always keep close by! The Sparkcharts chart is a binder sized insert which contains a number of cheat notes useful to the beginning Japanese learner. From pronunciation, to numbers, to dates and times, weather, greetings, colours, directions, body parts, relationships, clothing, health, adjectives, adverbs, and more, this chart is chock full of useful vocab that is incredibly easy to forget. My personal favourite is the “Verb” section which I do wish was about twice the size that it is. I cannot tell you how many times I have paused a conversation with someone to quickly and subtly flip through this insert. It has saved my butt countless times, and I hope it will for you as well!

BBC Japanese Phrase Book and Dictionary

Difficulty:

Rating:  ✫ ✫ ✫ ✫

This is just a useful book to carry around with you. It’s a collection of common questions and answers, phrases, etc organized neatly in a pocket sized book. There are many times I find myself turning to it to remember how a verb is conjugated in a certain sentence or which partical you use, and I must say it was worth the price!

Japanese the Manga Way (Wayne P Lammers)

Difficulty:  ☠ ☠

Rating:  ✫ ✫ ✫ ✫ ✫

This is one of my most recent textbooks I have gotten my hands on and it… is… brilliant! Let’s admit it, a good 80-90% of people who will be reading a post like this probably have SOME ties at least to manga and anime. IT IS TIME TO CHANNEL YOUR INNER NERDOM…. TO HELP YOUR BIGGER INNER NERDOM!!!

As for what I like about this book. The concept is actually incredibly simple… It simply will explain one example, then show a scene from some famous manga using said example. It will write out the scene in kanji, kana, romaji, direct translation, and complete translation, then it will explain what was said and why. It then takes the things you’ve learned from that lesson and build on that for the next lesson.

Ultimately it is simple. Each chapter has multiple examples which are each about half a page long, yet because it is so broken up and instantly tied to an example, it is by far one of the easiest textbooks to follow.

The book starts you from zero and works it’s way up, however I would suggest at least getting the basics of Japanese sentences down before taking this book on. A) it will make the textbook more enjoyable to you and B) this book focuses a lot more on casual sentences than polite sentences. It does explain this fact and does a very good job tracking with what politeness level is being used in what sentences, but I do still feel you would get a lot more out of it once you have some basics of Japanese culture and sentence structure down. Plus it will be more fun!

The JLPT N5-N1 Study Guides

Difficulty:  ☠ ☠ – ☠ ☠ ☠ ☠ ☠

Rating:  ✫ ✫ ✫ ✫

This one is sort of cheating as it’s not really a textbook as much as a study guide for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (JLPT) But honestly… if you are taking studying Japanese seriously, I HIGHLY recommend looking at these sooner or later. You won’t really be taught anything by them, but it’s useful to keep them nearby as a metric for how far you are progressing in your studies! Currently my end goal is N3-N2…. though I’m probably closer to N5.

PS: Just make sure to remember N5 is the EASIEST test and N1 is the HARDEST test… REMEMBER THIS! Lest you face the trauma of feeling your 2 years studying was completely wasted as you don’t even understand the questions on the easiest test let alone the answers! (somewhat experienced)

Remembering the Kanji

Difficulty: ☠ ☠

Rating:  ✫ ✫ ✫

Okay, you see this one on every post regarding learning Japanese, so of course I had to include it here too!

Remembering the Kanji is a book about (wait for it) Remembering the Kanji! Funny that eh? Well there are over 10 000 kanji out there and over 2000 you need to know for basic reading so if your memory is only good for remembering every embarrassing thing you said in grade school like mine is, you can use all the help you can get!

I’ll start off with what I like about this book. It claims to help you remember the kanji and it does a pretty good job at it. The concept is fairly simple. It shows you how Kanji isn’t just a bunch of random characters (at least most times) but actually has a lot of repeating patterns called radicals. By understanding the radicals you can start to follow the logic that came in making kanji to begin with. The easiest example. 口 (kuchi) means mouth or opening. Therefore when you see it in other kanji later on it is often tied to being an opening. My personal favourite of course is that if 日 means sun and 月 (Tsuki) means moon, then 明日 (ashita) will mean “Tomorrow” because if the sun comes up, then the moon, then the sun again it’s tomorrow!

As you can see, when it lines up  like that, it’s pretty helpful. Though occasionally it can seem more like a reaaaaal stretch.

As for why this book has such a low rating? Well I guess it all boils down to what you want to get out of your Japanese studies. If you just want to know how to react to certain signs, stay out of trouble, and that kind of stuff, this book will work great for you, as you’ll instantly know the English word that corresponds with the Japanese kanji. But that strength also has the weakness that you will ONLY know the English word that corresponds with the Japanese kanji.

For those who are just starting, let’s give a basic explanation here. Japanese has three writing systems. Hiragana used mostly for particles, conjugations, and some Japanese words, Katakana used for foreign words or emphasis, and kanji used for most base words. While Hiragana and Katakana are phonetic based (you know what sound they make by looking at them) kanji has multiple readings. Therefore if you just know the definition of the kanji you won’t know how to say it.

AKA You won’t know how to write it on a computer or say the word to someone else which makes it pretty unhelpful for your vocab. But! If you are okay with that, this book does a good job at what it does!

A Guide to Japanese Grammar (Tae Kim)

Difficulty  ☠ ☠ ☠

Rating  ✫ ✫ ✫ ✫

Every now and then I get a nice, cheap text book on my kindle that makes me feel “This should have cost me a lot more than it did. And this book is DEFINITELY one of them!

I will warn you up front lest the skulls and crossbones above not perform their job… this book will NOT hold your hand going through it… in fact the author makes certain to point out that this book won’t, because he considers holding your hand to be problematic to your learning.

What does this mean exactly? Well for starters you’ll be learning the kanji from page 1… yep! We dive in full force here! He does take the time to explain the Japanese writing system and such so it is not too extreme a dive, but it is still a bit daunting compared to other books I have read. But I won’t lie… it works.. I am a slow learner, but there are definitely some kanji I recognize now right away such as 食べる (taberu/to eat) which in my opinion is the most important verb you can know! 😉

Why does this work? I think a large reason for this, is that the author takes the extra effort to write out every word that will be used in the chapter at the beginning of the chapter. This means that when you do get stuck on a word (in my case at least once a sentence) you can easily flip back and check to see what it was. This does make me wish I bought the physical copy instead of the kindle version but…. if I did that there was no way I could afford all the books in this review 😛

Other than that, it is basically a book describing why Japanese grammar works the way it does. If you have worked in languages before it is very interesting learning the history and logic behind Japanese grammar and I found it very useful, however I would only suggest this book once you have a good grasp of the very basics of Japanese. Otherwise it is very easy to get cold feet and run

The Japanese From Zero Series

Difficulty ☠

Rating ✫✫✫✫

*Note: All Ratings will be Out of 5*

I am starting with this one because it was the first series I read through, and I think it holds a lot of merit.

Japanese from Zero is a series written by a translator named George Trombley Jr and has a unique feature to it that I personally found helpful for learning. That feature would be how they introduce you to Japanese characters.

Each book focuses on a different part of the Japanese writing system. Book 1 focuses on Hiragana, Book 2 on Katakana, and books 3 and 4 on Kanji, while also teaching you the basics of Japanese grammar and vocabulary. The trick to it however is that instead of simply giving you the complete alphabet on page 1 and then writing the whole book in said characters, Japanese from Zero uses a progressive system. Each chapter introduces you to a new row or two of it’s alphabet, and then replaces ONLY those characters. What starts out as a book mostly written in Romaji (Japanese writing in English characters) ends up being almost all in Japanese by the end.

Each lesson builds on the previous like this, so it is best not to skip ahead, and the workbook portions of it are great for review including practice on writing out the characters with the proper stroke order as well as translation and conversation practice.

Now this book series is not perfect in itself. There are a few times they mess up on their own progressive system, introducing characters you have not learned yet that throws you off when you’re focused, as well I found it to not be very useful for learning pronunciation or casual conversations. Because it covers such a broad amount of information it can appear to move slowly and yet be somewhat overwhelming at the same time.

That being said, while it is not the best as a one and only text book, but if you want to focus on improving your written Japanese, I can think of no series that does it better!

So You Want to Study Japanese?

Good for you! o(〃＾▽＾〃)o There are numerous reasons why learning any second language is an incredibly rewarding experience, and even more as to why learning Japanese specifically is rewarding.

Some of the good reasons are:

• It broadens your horizons
• It improves your cognitive abilities
• You learn words you to describe things you can’t in English
• It lets you meet new people (Who are incidentally AWESOME people!)
• It’s surprisingly fun to switch languages when no one understands
• Japan has an amazingly rich culture and beautiful locations
• Japanese culture is a great contrast to learn from compared to Western culture
• Japanese people have (in my experience) been very rewarding to talk to
• It’s really fun to see peoples’ reactions when you speak in Japanese
• Japanese Anime voice actors rock!

  

Some NOT so good reasons are:

• To be rich/famous (Japan has one of the largest NEEDS for natural English speakers and one of the stronger economies out there but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a LOT of people studying the language)

• To Experience anime-land (Sorry to say it, but the land of awakening powers, clothes bursting foods, and dozens of girls flocking to you simply because you care about your well being does not exist. Japanese people are just people… just like us…. oh except the food bit…. ya that is pretty mouth wateringly amazing!)

• To Look down your noses at anyone (Just… don’t okay?)

  

So now that that’s out of the way.

Why Make this Guide? And Who Are you to Make it?

Essentially, I have been asked a few times now if I could suggest what resources I have been using to study Japanese these last 3 years. I am NOT an expert Japanese speaker, however I AM an expert in being a horrible learner, so if nothing else, if “I” say it’s easy you can know I REALLY mean it! Also, After 3 years of studying on my own I have scoured the internet relentlessly for any and every resource tied to Japanese learning, so if I can help you avoid some of the time I spent searching, I’ve done my job!

So, without further ado! Let’s begin!