Zgarbas Wrote:I always recommend this book: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Short-Stories-Japanese-Michael-Emmerich/9780143118336

Javizy Wrote:By the way, kids literature is a nightmare.

Javizy Wrote:It's horrible looking at a block of text that takes you 5-minutes to get through, i.e. a page.

Zgarbas Wrote:I always recommend this book: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Short-Stories-Japanese-Michael-Emmerich/9780143118336 It's just really good, and the parallel translations are nice. Some of the stories are also quite good. Occasional grammar explanations at the end, but not considerable. Still a good set of texts to work on.

undead_saif Wrote:

Zgarbas Wrote:I always recommend this book: http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Short-Stories-Japanese-Michael-Emmerich/9780143118336 It's just really good, and the parallel translations are nice. Some of the stories are also quite good. Occasional grammar explanations at the end, but not considerable. Still a good set of texts to work on.

Wow I was going to make a thread about buying this, and here you are recommending it! It's the only considerable book to buy that I could find here, other things were phrase books and useless books. The set of Japanese books in the largest library here, has been the same for ages, and no one is buying one of the two copies of this book!

What level is recommended to start using it? (preferably in Tae Kim's and Core2k6k numbers)
Thanks.

Zgarbas Wrote:I got it around the N4, I think? Around core 3kish and finished Minna No Nihongo. Some texts are really easy (like the 2-page Murakami short story), some are longer and get a bit weird. All pretty enjoyable though. I'd say just dive in instead of waiting to get to a certain level and practice reading, while studying newly encountered terms and grammar points along the way. It's really the kind of book that serves as a starting point, so I think the earlier the better .

Betelgeuzah Wrote:I'm looking into buying a novel/textbook made for advanced beginners level / lower intermediate. Such as Breaking into Japanese literature, Reading japanese with a smile etc. that has parallel text in English included as well as vocab lists and such.

I searched and found out that BIJL is quite bad choice for a beginner since there is some outdated stuff in there. Reading Japanese with a smile looks good but the texts do seem quite short and I do not necessarily need grammar explanations since I have my dictionaries of Japanese grammar with me.

That said some longer texts with modern take on the language would be most preferred, of course parallel text in English is a huge plus too. If the difficulty increases along the way that would be great too.

Can you offer any recommendations for me?

Quote:Buy this book if:
- you are willing to put in effort. This might sound odd to mention, but more and more these days you hear of people who want to learn something without actually working at it. If you want to pick up a book, read it cover-to-cover, and suddenly be able to read Japanese, forget it. No book on Earth will let you do that. This is because you are learning something that requires effort to remember. Not much effort, but certainly a little bit at least, and it's needed constantly.
- you want to read, study, or understand Japanese literature. There are a lot of people who write enormously complex and detailed analyses of Japanese literature without speaking a word of the language themselves; such analyses often miss the point entirely for obvious reasons. If you want to appreciate Japanese literature, this book will get you started and build you up further.
- you want to read Japanese newspapers or novels. Why not?
- you want mastery of Japanese, like the book says. And by mastery, I mean being at a higher standard than most Japanese adults. This shouldn't have to be explicitly mentioned, but it seems a lot of other reviewers missed it, so there you go.

There are 75 lessons in this wonderful book divided into five sections: 17 in "Introductory", which cover hiragana, katakana, and a few (43 exactly) basic kanji including numbers. The next 13 lessons are in "Elementary", and are much more interesting. They cover stories and dialogues between people. I kept count of the kanji learnt as I went by making flashcards, so I can quite confidently say that by the end of Elementary, you will have exactly 365 kanji, including those from the Introductory section. The kanji are not just used once and then left alone; rather, after being introduced in a lesson, they reappear in subsequent lessons, so you stay familiar with them. After Elementary is "Intermediate", consisting of 17 lessons. These are more interesting again, as they describe various traditions, discuss why the culture is changing, and basically give you a very good idea of Japanese culture in general. Very few English works give you this much knowledge over an entire volume, let alone in 17 lessons only 1 or 2 pages long each. One story, "Rokubei's sheep", was absolutely adorable, and although it had no cultural information in the story itself (there were a few gems in the information below the vocab list), it's my favourite story from the entire section, and I became teary at the end. By the end of Intermediate, you will have a little over 1000 kanji, enough to read over 90% of a newspaper, and enough for nearly all everyday life. After Intermediate, there are two more sections: "Advanced: Fiction" (12 lessons) and "Advanced: Non-Fiction" (15). The Fiction section has a few stories written in an older form of Japanese (think Shakespearian English as a similar comparison), essential if you ever want to read or even study Japanese literature. Finally, the last lesson is a passage which you read to test yourself at the end of the book.

The texts start off as inane, like most basic language texts. The first few are largely word lists. However, they quickly build up to short sentences and conversations by the end of the Introductory section. In Elementary, you have more interesting stories and dialogues. This works up to cultural monographs, children's stories, anecdotes, and other more interesting pieces in Intermediate and Advanced.