In that case, I'll also put in a vote for Hiragana Times, the only bilingual Japanese-English magazine.

Check it out.

Contents
http://www.hiraganatimes.com/hp/magazine...nth-E.html

Sample Article (NOTE: try zooming in and out and look at the kanji)
http://www.hiraganatimes.com/hp/magazine/sample/030.pdf

Audio Samples
http://www.hiraganatimes.com/hp/magazine...ple_01.mp3
http://www.hiraganatimes.com/hp/magazine...ple_02.mp3
http://www.hiraganatimes.com/hp/magazine...ple_03.mp3
http://www.hiraganatimes.com/hp/magazine...ple_04.mp3
http://www.hiraganatimes.com/hp/magazine...ple_05.mp3

It took me a month to get through my first Japanese novel 「親指さがし」 by 山田・悠介（やまだ・ゆうすけ）。 It has been made into a film so now I've read the book, I'll be checking it out.

As far as a recommendation goes, language-wise I don't think it's too taxing for anyone who feels they are shooting over the JLPT2 kind of mark. Although even if you're done with Heisig but don't feel you know much Japanese, it might be worth having a go. You could probably get enough out of the kanji to get the jist of what's going on. I love seeing text jammed with kanji these days as that's almost the easy part!

Story-wise, it's supposed to be a horror story, which it is. But I think it's aimed at teenagers, so in that respect, being in my 30s, it struck me in some places as a little childish.

Anyway, on my last trip down to BookOFF! I picked up 「リング」 by 鈴木・光治（すずき・こうじ） again for 105 yen. As it was one of the first Japanese movies to grab my attention, I'm really looking forward to having a go at the text.

I am quite fond of Beikoku Ongaku whenever they manage to print one. You can supposedly get back issues too but I haven't had a need to try. The magazine is great, if you like to find out about new (or what once was new) music. I used to just read the English sections, but now that I have Heisig done and a good portion of the pure groups from book 2 I am attempting to read the Japanese bits.

Two great books for study: The Japanese Written Word: A Unique Reader by Glenn Melchinger and Helene Kasha

and

Breaking into Japanese Literature by Giles Murray.

The 2nd one is great for RTKers because it has SO many KANJI. You can also download mp3s of the stories off the web. The first book is, for whatever reason, not very popular. For the life of me I can't understand why. It has vocab lists, great stories and articles and is wonderful of Japanese learners of ALL levels. It does use romaji, which I don't like, but it keeps it on a separate page from the other text so it never an issue.

Bringing back an old thread, looking for some manga suggestions...

I see that there is going to be another　series of Evangelion movies 公式サイト, wiki which has made me want to know more about this long runner.　Has anyone read Evangelion? It seems like it could be pretty hard work.

ポケモン　

^_____^

厨房　:p

johnzep Wrote:ポケモン

Damn straight.

But I won't comment on my actual, uh, reading material.

well, hell. I'll add to this thread. I'm currently playing Earthbound on Super Nintendo, also known as Mother 2 (????).

I'm only a good 15% through RTK but my Japanese level is sub-okayish (as in slightly above totally poor). I've only just started, but I have two advantages:

- In a game, i won't ignore things because if I don't understand what somebody is saying, I might die
- I've played the game before in English, so I have some vague idea of what is (or should be) going on.

Plenty of slang being thrown around, and it is a little hard to read due to absolute lack of Kanji, but hey, it's kinda fun. We'll see if I stick to that.

As mspertus was talking books on another thread I thought I'd mention my progress, or lack of, regarding what I'm reading.

Gave up on リング due to lack of following what was going on well enough to enjoy it. This annoyed me a bit coz I've watched the film plenty of times. The parts of the book that I was familiar with from the movie were great though.

I'm looking forward to actually reading it once I "level up" my Japanese.

That put me off reading novels for a bit. But now that I'm back into it I'm having a go at ハリー・ポッターと賢者の石。Even though I don't understand every word, it is fairly enjoyable to read due to having read the English version.

What you reading these days?

Sorry to hear about your bad luck with Ring and I hope you give it another try later. I thought the story was really interesting and the movie made a helluva lot more sense after reading the book.

Right now I'm reading ねじまき鳥クロニクル by Haruki Murakami. It's extremely long (about 1000 pages), but it's a lot better than his other book that I've read, ノルウェイの森. I'm enjoying it.

This morning my principal gave me a book to read: 兎の眼 by Kenjiro Haitani. Either his writing style takes some getting used to, or it's just bad, because I'm having a hard time understanding it. I think my principal thought it would suit me because of its comparatively light kanji usage, but that conversely makes it harder to read. It's especially annoying when a compound is written half in hiragana and half in kanji. Urgh.
But the author is born in Kobe and educated in Osaka, so the book's dialogue is in Kansai-ben, which is pretty cool.

I thought I would chime in here...
I have pretty much put all my reading on hold after I discoverd the heisig book and this website. However here are some of my reading suggestions/goals.

Nihongo Journal.
I really like this magazine, better than Hiragana times and other such mags.
One reason is that the articles are extremly interesting and provide a lot of variety. In addition, the book is writen with non Japanese in mind, so they intorduce a lot of Japanese culture in the readings.
For example, here are some of the articles in my latest edition:
Seasonal Expressions in Japanese
The Proficiency Test Craze
Japanese Manners you should know]
Current news topics
Deciphering Newspaper Articles
Learning Japanese thru Manga
and many more

The magazine is billingule with english translation. Also, it has furigana over the kanji the first time the kanji is intorduced, but not after. this makes you really pay attention to what you are reading.
Over all I like this magazine.

Also, I was reading the translation of Frank Herbirt`s Dune, just cause I love that book so much. I still pick it up every now and then and realize how much this website has helped my Kanji. I plan to read it from the start after finishing RTK1.

And, I also have harry potter on the horizan. If you have a decent amount of grammer and finish RTK1, I think you can read this book for the most part.

cheers

While I have finished RTK1 and am about half-way through the onyomi in RTK2, my reading ability is still quite abysmal, and I was having difficulty finding something I was interested in enough to justify the amount of time and effort. And then it hit me. If a Japanese woman wrote to me in Japanese, I would be very motivated to read her letters!

So this is what I am reading: 絹代の手紙。

She writes to me in Japanese with a little English. I write to her in English with a little Japanese. It is a start... And we both win.

I learn the lyrics of Anime Songs for ones that I like and think sound good.

Picking this thread up as an update on what the york's been reading.

Has anyone on the board read "The Game" by Neil Strauss? It's a really great non-fiction book about the world of Pick Up Artists. Funny as hell with those really short chapters so you can put it down after only a few (or 10 if in Japanese) minutes of reading. I am now reading a 日訳 version, and it's great. If I hadn't already read it in English first, I think it might have been hard going, but I have, so it's ok.

also, a (kinda) related book, is ホムンクルスの目
which is a psychology book about reading peoples body language etc.

I thought Nihongo Journal had ceased publication...

I'm reading Haruki Murakami's [kana]murakami asahidou[/kana], which is a collection of short essays on various topics (tofu, movies, yakuza) he wrote for a newspaper. The grammar is pretty simple, so it's good for vocabulary and kanji practice, plus he's a good writer.

I have a couple of travel books, too, on the stack, but I haven't gotten to them yet. I find that simple, descriptive writing works well, because I don't get lost as easily as in a lot of fiction.

I'm currently reading Endo Shusaku's The Samurai. Recently I've read Kawabata's Snow Country, Abe Kobo's The Woman in the Dunes, , Tanizaki's The Key and Mishima's Confessions of a Mask.
With every novel I read I become more and more convinced that Japan has produced literature of a standard that rivals and perhaps surpasses that of any other country.
While I can't say that my Japanese is yet at a standard where I can hope to read the original texts without constant reference to a dictionary, it remains my goal to one day be able to do so.

Right now I'm reading Alice in Wonderland in Japanese http://www.genpaku.org/alice01/alice01j.html I haven't read the English version, but I don't need to, I guess. I can understand almost all of it with rikaichan.

I'm also reading a book from the library, 恐怖同盟. It's a book of sometimes disturbing short stories. I'm half way through, but I haven't been picking it up much lately. I dunno why I procrastinate about things I like. I ordered Harry Potter 2 and some light novels online , but they haven't been shipped yet...

I also read random Japanese fanfiction. Most of what I've found so far is good : ) They're all short and feel a bit poetic.

Naniwa, Endo is really good-- Silence I found quite powerful, and his short stories also are good. Some of his minor works suffer from over-symbolic characters (like Wonderful Fool), but I think he's not read & talked about enough compared to the others. I guess being Catholic kind of puts him out of the loop.

I have Snow Country in Japanese (though I seem to have misplaced it). I've only read the first page a few times, but it is quite beauitful and simple (not sure about the rest of the book!). Oe I think is great, too, but I haven't gotten into his later William Blake-influenced stuff.

And you're right, there have been some fantastic Japanese writers in the 20th century. Interesting to me that the guys you mention all seemed to know each other and travel in the same circles-- it's been a pretty small group. I guess Japan is kind of like that, especially in elite parts of the society (he says from afar).

Has anyone read any recent Japanese poetry that's not haiku or tanka? I know nothing about this and would like to fix that.