Genki Japan Blog はじめまして。

I was debating whether to stick this in a blog post or not since I'm writing an ebook regarding languages (I'm not giving anything away yet), and I was going to cover this early on in the book. Regardless, I'm tired of hearing academics, fellow language enthusiasts, and psuedo intellectuals going on and on about how you have to have a "good" reason to learn a language or fail. They go on and on about their superior motivations ranging from "I'm learning X language because of my heritage!" or "I'm moving to X country and need to speak the language." They'll usually carry attitudes of, "You can't learn X language because of music, movies, TV, or books! That's not a good reason!" "Bullcrap!" is how I respond to that. You just need a reason to keep you learning, whatever that reason is. Sure, a lot of people who are learning Japanese because of anime tend to not do so good in class. In psychology it w...

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,...