Bilingual Books!

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Books that not only include Japanese and English text, but also explain that text, can be a very useful addition to your library, especially when you’re looking to delve into reading for the first time. Today I want to talk to you about 3 such books that I use and enjoy myself. First up is…

Fiction just got real, son

Read Real Japanese Fiction is a collection of several by Japanese for Japanese short stories with explanations in English. Aimed at the intermediate learner, each page features the original vertical Japanese text with (some) furigana on the right side, and a breakdown on the left side. One interesting thing to note is that the book never provides you with a full translation of the original story. Instead, it explains what it considers to be the more difficult parts, sometimes with literal phrasing. A lot of the stories are serious and more on the PG+ side, although the first one reminds me a lot of Polar Bear Cafe. The book comes with an audio CD that I listen to during my commute.

All About Particles is technically a grammar textbook, but the way it’s presented makes it fit in quite well with the rest of the bunch from today’s post. Despite the title, it covers far more than just particles, but also things like sentence endings and other previously perplexing pieces of prose. It’s very much to the point, which is what makes this book so jam packed. You’ll see a brief but effective explanation of the grammar point in question, followed by several Japanese-English example sentences. That’s literally how the whole book works. No worksheets, no huge introductions, just tons of useful examples to enlighten your Japanese journey. There are also a few shared Anki decks based on this book.

Reading Japanese With A Smile is similar to Read Real Japanese Fiction, but with a few differences in content and presentation. The premise is the same: they show you a story, and then explain it. First though, this book does provide a full side by side translation of each story. After that however, it will show you parts of the story, this time with furigana, in little boxes, and then explain it in English right below on the same page. As the cover says, these stories tend to be a little more wacky and offbeat, so be prepared for anything!

Paper–it does still exist!

Taking time to wind down before sleep is something I’ve been making an effort to do lately. I’m a firm believer in the idea of rest helping your studies. The biggest factor in winding down for me is no screens. So no PC, iPad, phone, DS, or TV. This means having a special time where there’s a chance every day to explore things like the books mentioned in this post. Give it a try, you may find yourself more relaxed with better sleep! And a rested mind is always ready for more 日本語（にほんご）!

 

A few Books Worth Getting

There are not a whole lot of books that I endorse for learning Japanese however There are a few that I got out of curiosity sakes that I must admit are pretty darn cool. If you are a beginner to an intermediate person, or looking perhaps for a spark after you’ve been studying a while, these books might be able to help put a little jump into your Japanese battery.

The first book I want to go over is one that a few people have recommended to me. So after much debate I decided to get it and read it up.

The Quick and Dirty Guide to Learning Languages Fast by A.G. Hawke  

While this book is mostly intended for a beginner, and offers an intense boot camp like feel to it for a 30 day adventure, it can be reworked for any level of learning.

The first 3rd of the book basically gives you an overview of what’s going to happen and how the author came up with this plan. It also tells you what to gather and how to get in the swing of the language. If you’re familiar with AJATT method of immersion, then you’ll be right at home here.

The second 3rd of the book is the layout of Days 1-7, where you grapple the basics of your language, create yourself a language notebook, and get down and dirty with your new language.

The last 3rd of the book basically deals with the remaining time of the month, where you streamline and customize your lists and such to suit your growing need for new material to learn.

The book is pretty neat in helping you lay out self learning techniques if you’ve done them before. A lot of beginners just don’t know where to start, and intermediate to advanced learners can always use a little boost of ideas to improve and help them get further along.

So if you’re feeling a little lost on what things to do next, this book might just help you out with that dilimea. That said, I do want to state that this book is not about Japanese specifically and must be modified to fit it just a bit.

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While I’ll tell you the best grammar book I’ve ever enjoyed is Japanese The Manga Way, there is also a really good sentence example filled book that is All About Particles!

All About Particles: A Handbook of Japanese Function Words by Naoko Chino 

This very affordable book I would even go as far to say is a great addition to any beginner to intermediate learner’s book shelf. I personally bought mine from Amazon, used, and super cheap from The Book Depository, and when it arrived, I was pretty happy with my purchase.

While I must admit I’m a tad bit further than the book, in terms of understanding particles, it has not been a waste of money. The book really goes into detail explaining useages of the particles as well as giving sentence examples of every instance. Usually there are about 3-4 sentence per usage, and to boot there are plenty of notes to help you along the way.

The sentences themselves are set up in the following way: (this is the first example shown in the book for wa/は):

あそこに赤い本がありますね。あれは漢字の本です。

asoko ni akai hon ga arimasu ne. Are wa kanji no hon desu.

Over there is a red book, right. It’s a kanji book. / See the red book over there? That’s a kanji book.

While I’m not overly thrilled by the appearance of romanji, its not so bad since there is no furigana for the kanji. so if you come across a kanji you are unfamiliar with, and aren’t completely sure of the sounds it is suppose to have, you can use the romanji as reference. However, you could just write the furigana yourself, and whiteout the roman characters.

There is both an excellent table of contents and index to help you find what you’re looking for. Otherwise, there really isn’t much more to say about the book, other than its really easy to understand, especially through the examples. The sentences themselves never seem complicated, and they are mostly short and pretty good for sentence mining methods.

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I saved the best for last. This book is really helpful for intermedete to advanced learners who’ve found themselves in a rut. This 173 page book is packed with a lot of really useful tricks and tips about getting more out of your studying experience.

13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese by Giles Murray 

Generally when books promise crazy results, or some unknown secret, I get extremely skeptical and do not buy them. This one however, after hearing rave reviews from personal friends decided to buy it. It was extremely cheap for me to get used, so there wasn’t much of a financial investment if the book was a dud. I was most pleasantly surprised however at this book and its contents!

Beyond the table of Contents, a little introduction, and an index, the book is divided into 13 sections. The 13 Secrets that is.

Each Secret is broken down with a little objective, explanation of the secret, some examples of it in Japanese, then a Quiz followed by its answers.

To me, the best of them all (#4) dealt with number bands, as numbers are my weak point once they get past 100. There is a lot of incorporated vocabulary, grammar, and so on, which its only downfall being no furigana and romanji for those who can’t read Japanese well enough.

But I must admit, even for me, this book brought a lot to light that I had not ever considered to incorporate into my studying. And it was like a breath of fresh air that helped mix things I knew with things I didn’t know to make a nice warm yummy awesome cake. It was a tiny shove in the back that helped me begin to climb another mountain of learning. So this book, of them all is the most recommended, especially if you’re stuck in a rut!

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There were about 3 other books I tried out, which I have to admit, I didn’t like nor found as useful as the books I already use, so they went out to find a home of someone else, and I wont talk about them. I’m a great believer that just because it didn’t help me, that it couldn’t revolutionize your world, so I’ll refrain from even mentioning their titles. Just know that sometimes, a book that only cost you 5 bucks (ie. 13 secrets!) can be worth a gold mine for your learning!

 

Tools Review: 8 – Grammar Books

Since we talked about all the different places to get some of your text books, lets cover a variety of grammar books out there. Now those who follow closely to the context method (grammar only learned after you learned) don’t tend to like grammar books. However if you’re one who likes to study grammar, or is looking for a book to explain why you’re doing what you’re doing there are a number of fun books out there, as well as some serious head nodders.

I’ll try to cover some popular ones, as well as my personal favorite. There are also some websites that offer some yummy grammar points too. The difference between a grammar book and a course book is simply that the grammar book doesn’t take the time out to teach you vocabulary, kanji readings, culture, or anything of that sort for the most part. Its simply there to tell you about the building blocks of the language and why things are done the way they are.

Do you need to know grammar to learn a language?

There is a large argument over this in the language learning community. The argument from those saying no is simply that you could speak, read, and write in your language without knowing grammar, so you should be able to learn a language without it. They also claim that grammar rules can cause you to be to strict when trying to create sentences as well as miss out on all the varying subtle exceptions (and let there be no doubt, there are hundreds and thousands of exceptions).

On the flip side, some claim that grammar is an inescapable part of learning a language, or that learning grammar allows you to learn the language faster since you already have an understanding of grammar rules and building blocks from having studied your own in school. The argument is finding one that allows you to build sentences from scratch based on logical grammar rules will allow you to take virtually any vocabulary word and plug and play, and understand the various intricate meanings of sentences.

So regardless of which boat you fall into, its not horrible to own a really fun grammar book. I fall into the first boat, I believe that one doesn’t need to memorize grammar rules to use the language. Even still I have a grammar book for whenever I want to satisfy some odd curiosity of why or what. It really doesn’t matter which you believe, but rather which way works best for you.

The following list of course is a focus for those who are still reading primarily English. There are are a lot of books out there in Japanese but we’ll cover those later.

J Gram:

This website is pretty popular and a bit more versatile past just grammar. Because the community is large questions can often be resolved quickly.

JGram is dedicated to helping people learn to speak Japanese, in the most effective interactive way: by communicating, sharing knowledge, and talking between Japanese and non-native speakers. This is an interactive community where you are encouraged to contribute your knowledge to our growing database of Japanese grammar. We also encourage you to spread the word and recruit your friends (especially any native speaking friends) to contribute.

Tae Kim’s Guide to Japanese Grammar:

This guide was created as a resource for those who want to learn Japanese grammar in a rational, intuitive way that makes sense in Japanese. The explanations are focused on how to make sense of the grammar not from English but from a Japanese point of view.

This is probably one of the most talked about and used resources in the grammar loving community out there. I always hear about this site, references to it, and so on. Its a great site to check out and recommended to anyone seriously trying to get their grammar on.

Japanese Lessons with Maggie:

Some fun dog pictures, wacky lady, fun lessons!

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More like reviewing grammar points versus learning guide:

• Tim Takamatsu
• The Japanese Page

Visualizing Japanese Grammar:

This site has little mini flash videos to teach you lessons. It seems like a fun way to go about learning grammar points, especially for those visually orientated.

Japanese The Manga Way:

This grammar book is one I own. Its a very fun, picture filled way of learning grammar points. Its laid out pretty easily and goes from simple to complex sentence structures of course, following Japanese and not English layouts. It has all its examples using manga. The artwork is original using Japanese text, then to the side the Japanese text, romaji, English literal translation and then the general translation. It has little culture and vocabulary notes here and there as well.

I feel it does a great job explaining things as well as always noting when it was proper for a man or a woman to say certain phrases or words as well as cover the basics of honorifics. This book does seem to focus of course more on spoken Japanese verses written, which is just fine for me. I write English how I speak it so this is fine for me.

If you probably wanted to get more in depth in terms of honorifics, specific terms and such like that, this book wont really deliver. However if you want a great beginner to intermediate book, then this is perfect (specially if you like having fun!).

A Dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar:

This three book series is well praised for its simplicity, easy to look up features, as well as being divided into three levels to help. I haven’t found many bad things at all about this series in fact, though I haven’t seen inside the cover myself.

There is something for everyone in these books regardless if you’re self studying or studying along side a text/class.

To me though they seem a tad pricey.

The Ninhongoresources Grammar Book:

I like to promote up and coming work that is free and growing. This site is one of those, made by Michiel Kamermans, it is a grammar book that uses Japanese script and has three forms: internet, pdf, and physical book you can buy. A lot of the pages from this book is used in wiki so you might already be familiar with some of the information from this site, however its a nice free resource either way.

Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar:

This book is very popular for those going to take the JLPT, as well as those covering basic to intermediate Japanese. Apparently this book has a motherlode of sentences. So if you’re a sentence picker, it might be a nice little treasure box for you.

みんなの日本語 (Minna No Nihongo):

While this series isn’t just grammar books, there are lots of grammar points covered and practiced specifically and can supplement your studies. They’re a bit expensive for my taste, but the series is mentioned in forums quite a bit as a goodie to have.

Japanese Verbs and Essentials of Grammar:

This handy little book is great for sentence picking, quick look ups, and it doesn’t take up to much space on your shelf. It’s also really inexpensive and I just realized I have this book. hahaha, I bought it back in the day and its been collecting dust! I told you that I didn’t believe in grammar all that much

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If you have a book you like and use a lot that focuses on grammar, mention it below!