Anyone used this book at all: http://www.amazon.co.jp/%E5%AE%8C%E5%85%...F8&s=books

its by 3a network (完全マスター　books) and is for vocabulary learning towards 2級 and 1級 of the JLPT.

i really like their books on grammar and am using them at the moment, but i have never used the vocabulary book. hence the post.

I guess it depends on what your goals are.

If you're only looking for studying towards the exam, I guess it's sufficient.
I think I read somewhere about the book being a massive listing of vocab words
and readings for each kanji. Again, OK I guess if you're studying for the exam, but
don't expect it to do wonders for your conversations.

I'd say the best way to build vocabulary is by doing a lot of reading.
Find something in Japanese that you find interesting to read and stick with
it. Another thing you could do is watch TV shows without subtitles. After a
while, you'll be able to pick out phrases that you know you haven't heard
before. That's where I get a lot of my vocab from. And it definitely makes
you sound more like a native speaker.

Something that might also be interesting would be to go through the lists of vocab
with a native and have them mark off the words they think are useful to know.
I'd guess that maybe only 20% to 35% of the words are actually useful in rea life.

Also, Unicom publishes a JLPT reading exercise book called Reading 100. It's for JLPT Level 1 and 2. 100 short readings for practice and they contain a lot of grammar that'll appear on the exam. You might want to look at this.

Unicom books
http://www.unicom-lra.co.jp/ja/ja_e.html

Reading 100
http://www.unicom-lra.co.jp/ja/ja5_e.html#ja5_e

Douzo.

I have most UNICOM books, they are really good, concise and easy to use. Nice selection of reading texts, too, on subjects that are so varied that they are unlikely to be part of one's reading matter otherwise...

chamcham, are you sure that you're not referring to the kanji books of the same series?

this one is supposed to be used *after* having learned all of the vocab. basically, you learn to differentiate between seemingly similar words (e.g. hattatu / hatten / shimpo). this book was a great helo for me, since i studied all of the vocab myself.

i agree that watching japanese tv is a great tool for learning. i find variety shows to be easy to understand, and you learn a lot about japanese modern culture.

oh, and i scored 98% on the vocab part.

Maybe I'm confusing the kanji and vocab books, since I've never actually
read either or them. But I thought I read a comment somewhere about the
goi book. But maybe I'm wrong....... :-(

in this case, being wrong is a good thing =) it's a great book!