Skip to main content

Japanese the Manga Way





So, you think you can just go and learn basic Japanese without all those boring textbooks? You think you can just use manga? While I wouldn't recommend this book as your sole text book, I do endorse it as being a great book to familiarize yourself with casual, spoken Japanese.






I'm sure another textbook comes to your mind: Japanese in Mangaland. The big difference between this book and that book is that this one uses real manga. It takes the actual manga, and then uses it to build lessons regarding reading, grammar, and other basic skills. I've heard that the manga featured in the other book is actually made up. I also found a few small errors in the Mangaland book.






It slowly builds up on complex sentence structures, covering things most formal texts leave out, and it's fairly easy to remember what you've read. My biggest disappointment with this book is that it only covers basic skills. It should really come out with more volumes, like Japanese in Mangaland does, and some workbooks as well. I'll bet it could actually take you through all the JLPT tests if it did this.






It's a gimmick book, but there's real solid information in it, and the gimmick does more than hook manga fans into it. It's not just about reading manga; it's about learning Japanese.




You can download a small sample of it here.

Comments

  1. Japanese the Manga Way is an illustrated guide for learning conversational Japanese using our beloved manga format.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review for Rosetta Stone

I told you I wasn’t gone for good! Today I’m going to be mostly bashing Rosetta Stone’s language learning software. This review goes for Rosetta Stone whether you’re learning Japanese or any other language that this software purports to teach. It purports to teach because Rosetta Stone is particularly bad at teaching anything, except how to look at pictures and repeat words. It’s aimed mostly for travelers, but doesn’t really get you conversing, and it’s expensive to boot. Really, there’s only a couple things it does well, but this isn’t enough to make up for all the failing this software does. If anyone from Rosetta Stone actually reads this, please use the criticism to improve your software! You probably already know that Rosetta Stone teaches you language easily, right? I mean, that’s what the advertisements always tell us! What Rosetta Stone tells us and what it actually does are like night and day, but if you really don’t know much about Rosetta Stone, here’s what allegedl...

Review for LingQ - Redone!

I really wanted to do a review for LingQ , and I wound up doing a long and crazy post about things that didn't have much to do with LingQ. As such, I am redoing this post in hopes of better clarifying what LingQ is and how well it works. For starters, anyone even remotely familiar with Steve Kauffman will know that he's a huge supporter of what is normally called the input method. That basically means that you learn a language simply through exposure to it. No grammar drills, just listening, reading, and anything else you can think of that will expose you to the language. As such, that is exactly what LingQ strives to do. The most frustrating thing about learning an Asian language through the input method, in my opinion, is that if you're reading a book or a non-editable pdf, if you come across a kanji you're not sure how to read, you can't just type it into a dictionary. That frustrates me a lot! That's why LingQ is so good about that. You just hover your mou...

Friday Review: Chrono Trigger

This is a really great game for anyone who likes a good story to be told! It has an intriguing plot, interesting characters, and great gameplay. This game has been hailed many times as one of the greatest RPGs ever! It's techinically for SNES, but you can now find it for the Nintendo DS. This review is for the SNES version and the Playstation remake only, as I have never played the DS version and am unsure as to whether gameplay elements have been changed or not. Plot Overview: Crono, a young man, has been placed in a situation where he must travel through time to save the world, in each and ever era, from certain destruction. It’s very complicated to explain, but trust me, the plot is very good and well-thought-out. Artwork: The artwork looks a lot like DBZ, but I don’t care. If you look really closely, the artwork is slightly different in the Playstation remake than in the original – the characters are shorter and fatter in the Playstation version, which I found to be kin...