Japanese: Books

I was going through some notes and thought I would take the time to note the books I have bought to learn Japanese over the last couple years. My official Japanese school books at the point are the Minna no Nihongo series released by 3A Corporation, but they aren’t the only books helping me to learn:

Writing Hiragana: An Introductory Japanese Language Workbook by Jim Gleeson (Tuttle) ~ Excellent for repetition of the Hiragana plus some words, sentences and phrases.

Writing Katakana: An Introductory Japanese Language Workbook by Jim Gleeson (Tuttle) ~ Katakana is the script used for foreign words and emphasis. This is also a great book for repetition of the characters. Plus words, phrases and locations.

The First 100 Japanese Kanji: The quick and easy way to learn the basic Japanese Kanji by Eriko Sato Ph.D. (Tuttle) ~ I am currently using this to supplement the assigned Kanji in class. This is not as great as the kana books, but still awesome for the repetitiveness.

Minna no Nihongo book 1 (3A Corporation) ~ School Books, very conversational, some translations leave a little to be desired, but overall a fun and informative series in the classroom.

Minna no Nihongo book 2 (3A Corporation) ~ School Books, see above.

Write Now! Kanji for Beginners (3A Corporation) ~ From the company the does my schoolbooks. It doesn’t coincide with the lessons, but it is a nice book. It lists a certain amount of kanji in each lesson and by the end of the chapter you are that many more kanji richer in knowledge. As the name suggests, it gets you writing and reading kanji immediately.

Kana de Manga by Glenn Kardy and Chihiro Hattori (Manga University) ~ a simple book, fun, but essentially I found it useless. The book comes with the kana, Hiragana on one page, Katakana for the same sound on the other, a little bit of information and a pronounciation guide plus a few squares for practice. the back of the small book has more blank pages. For someone who learns well and quickly this is great, for me not so much.

Kanji de Manga vol. 1 by Glenn Kardy and Chihiro Hattori (Manga University) ~ I like the book, it has some cute scenes and explanations in it, but until I was actually taking a class, listening to a podcast and playing a video game all teaching me, I couldn’t understand what it was telling me. Again if you learn quickly and well, a quick explanation that is not in the book would make this series awesome for you.

Tags: Books, japanese

News: Wheel of Time

I was impressed this morning when I discovered that many very cool announcements were presented about the Wheel of Time series this weekend at the Dragon*con. Tor.com’s WordPress Blog tells all about the news. The two announcements that really have me excited though are the news about the entire series being released officially to eBook, and the Fact that they will all have new cover art exclusively for that format. Totally rockin’! Go check it out! It looks like they will release the series sequentially, they haven’t listed a time schedule yet, but we can expect The Eye of the World to appear October 27, 2009, the same release day as The Gathering Storm

Tags: Books, fantasy, news, wheel of time