Hello,

I'm wondering if anyone out there has an opinion on this book. A description (in Japanese) is available here: http://www.japanese-nihongo.com/books/index.html . This is the second book in the list (the pink one).

We've been using it in a small group for the last two weeks, and so far have found it rather horrible. While we were capable of reading the text without any major dramas, the questions seemed to have been written with the sole purpose of fooling the reader. Even the native Japanese speaker in our group (the pseudo-supervisor) was misled on a number of occasions.

One of us has already passed JLPT2, and that person has the opinion that the actual test questions were nowhere near as tricky. Personally, I am planning to take JLPT2 this year, and am wondering if this is the sort of questions I need to expect.

Can someone else share their opinion on this book? Suggestions for other reading comprehension books would also be good.

Cheers,
Misha

Edit: fixed URL.

JLPT questions are designed to be misleading (especially the listening questions) instead of reflecting realistic Japanese usage. Using practice material of the same misleading type would be good practice.

I agree with your friend, the test questions were not as "tricky" as these ones. And they are laid out differently.

I passed the JLPT2 in 2006 and had used this book, along with the unicom books for practicing reading.

I thought this particular book was the cheapest thing i had ever seen. I pretty much threw it to the bottom of the pile and never looked at it again. That being said, my reading score my worst out of all the other sections.

Since my initial opinion of this book wasn't particularly high, I thought it would be good for me to re-visit this topic once I've had a more thorough look at it.

I'm now pretty much at the end of the book and have noticed that the "tricky" answers have started to make a lot more sense. Based on past JLPT exams, my general reading comprehension proficiency has improved a lot since April. I've been using other materials (such as the Unicom reading & comprehension book) as well, but I'm inclined to say that this book probably had a lot to do with the marked improvement.

I hope I haven't mislead anyone into not buying this book. I'm going to use it as the warm-up to my JLPT2 test tomorrow morning.

Misha