shopping spree
August 2nd, 2005 by heatheruntil now i had not spent any money on this little hobby. i wanted to spend ages reading reviews of products and making a plan for self-learning. i’d like to see if i can get some hours with a japanese tutor in the autumn, after i get some more self-learning done. i went to the amazing bookstore: green apple books on clement street in san francisco.
i took advice about kana seriously so i had to tear myself away from the tempting romaji materials out there. so i got ‘japanese for busy people I, the kana version’. i’m planning on learning kana from the start, listening to as many audio materials as i can gather as cheaply as possible.
The CD set: Dr Blair’s Japanese in No Time is intriguing. I also got it for 11 USD which is nice too. I’ll listen to that on my flight back tomorrow.
I got “Hiragana for fun”, because it’s so cute, using illustrations to as memory aids, and it was 6 USD. They did not have Helsig’s book, which I intended to get, but they had “A guide to learning Hiragana and katakana”, which focuses on writing.
A Guide to Learning Hiragana and Katakana (Tuttle Language Library)
I understand kanji is down the line, but i got this book because it made sense to me: Kanji, Pict-o-graphy, and it was happily used at 13 USD.
Kanji Pict-O-Graphix: Over 1,000 Japanese Kanji and Kana Mnemonics (Paperback) by Michael Rowley
I wish I had considered the books that teach japanese through comics. It might have been amusing.
Next, I need to get the CDs for Japanese for busy people, otherwise I don’t see how that book can be useful. I also read that the Situational Functional Japanese books were goood. They use furigana under the Kanji. That might be good to use with a tutor as well.
Why don’t all books come with audio? Makes no sense.
August 2nd, 2005 at 9:55 am
Two books I highly recommend to learn the kanas, both written by Yasuko Kosaka Mitamura, are:
Let’s Learn Hiragana: First Book of Japanese Writing
Let’s Learn Katakana: Second Book of Japanese Writing
They also have one for kanji (Let’s Learn Kanji), but I didn’t get there yet, so I cant say if its good. But some people I know say it is good, especially because it builds up from strokes, to radicals and components, to 250 basic kanji which are themselves components of other kanji.
August 4th, 2005 at 8:41 pm
i noticed they don’t have the let learn hirigana books in the US amazon site (but they have them in the UK site). i’ll try getting them when i get back to ireland. there’s a good bookstore in dublin: modern languages on westland row that i’m keen on visiting. hopefully they will have them there so i can look through them.
thanks for the tip!
August 15th, 2005 at 1:33 pm
[…] recordings. and i knew the hiragana from practicing with my handy-dandy flashcards, and the tools mentioned before. i’d say about 60% of my answers were process of elimin […]
October 4th, 2005 at 6:21 am
When you get past the hiragana and katakana and move onto the Kanji, I bought a ton of expensive books with little progress before I got Kanji Starter (Paperback) by Daiki Kusuya..its on amazon…and its indespensible