There are a lot of books to learn Japanese from, but not all of them are good. I even portrayed one in “Why Your Language Book is Holding Your Japanese Back” where I show what the book has, and why it is a problem for learning Japanese.

Something I came to terms with a long time ago is I learn differently than most other people so I have gone through a lot of books as I try and the books I can learn from the best, and reference. Below is a list of books I suggest and use to learn.

Text Books

• Elementary Japanese Vol 1
• Elementary Japanese Vol 2
• An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese
• Dirty Japanese: Everyday Slang (not a textbook, but good reference)

I’ll be honest, I haven’t had a lot of time with intermediate japanese, but the book I do have seems good so far.

Dictionaries

• Random House Japanese-English English-Japanese Dictionary

Kanji Books

• Remembering the Kanji
• The Kodonsha Kanji Learner’s Dictionary

I hope this list helps others in what they deice to learn from, and hopefully save them some money I had to spend.

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I recently was able to come accross this book, Mangajin’s Basic Japanese through comics, from a friend in my Japanese class. At first I was skeptical at how much use this book would be on learning practical Japanese, but I can honestly say I am/was impressed.

The book is broken up into 24 lessons (or chapters) that are all standalone lessons. you don’t know to read the previous one to understand the one you are on. They use a lot of practical examples, like actual manga panes. They show several the kanji, romaji, rough translation, and readable translation for all the text in each pane. Here is an example:

It also explains different parts of what you read so you can better understand.

I think the best part about the whole book is it explains a lot of cultural things and how culturally things are said over standard Japanese. I think the greatest thing I you can pick up is when you start listening to conversations after reading this book you will understand a lot more of what is being said as it goes over subtle nuances that usually aren’t explained in a textbook, but through experience.

After reading this book I would like to say a chapter is the best, but I really can’t. However, the most interesting one, that confirmed a few suspicions, is the the kanji section. It goes in more detail, but basically sometimes the furigana isn’t necessarily the actual reading. The kanji is there for you to know what “type” of something is taking place. The book gives a lot of examples.

If you are interested in reading untranslated manga, Mangajin’s Basic Japanese through comics, is a good bet on getting started since it is geared towards the gaijin. So go ahead and get it read it and let me know what you think.

Also there is a Mangajin’s Basic Japanese Through Comics (Part 2). I hope to get it sometime and i’ll let you know how it is too.

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Khatzumoto finally released the much anticipated, by his readers, Quick Reference Guide to AJATT. As an avid reader of his site and practitioner of AJATT, with my own twist, I was excited to be able to buy this and give it a look.

As a note, like he does, if you read his whole site you don’t NEED this guide. However, it is for those that need a bit more of a helping hand than what the main site offers.

To start it is broken into say 12 bookmarked sections for you to read. The first 24 pages are more precision instruments of things to understand about the AJATT method to get you started in why the how works. The other 22 pages are the how to do AJATT in solid action steps. Where Khatsumoto clearly explains what to do.

This is for sure a Quick Reference Guide. I would also like to say it is a companion guide to the AJATT site itself. It more clearly defines the goals of the main site and compliments the main AJATT site. While you should be certain to read the main site the QRG fills in a couple of holes along the way.

One thing that troubled me about the main site is it explained a lot of theory but the atualy doing was left a little dry and took a lot of inferring to figure it out, however it was very possible. Sometimes though a precise description just helps a lot and the QRG provides that.

Another benefit to the QRG is the diagrams. The main site provides some really weird hard to follow diagrams, but the QRG provides a simple visual representation of the order in which you should learn things. Personally, I think the order should switch the kana and the kanji, but at the end of the day to get to the sentences, which is the bread and butter of AJATT, you need to know them both so to some degree following the pure AJATT method it doesn’t really matter. Back to the main diagram It was pretty exciting to see it as the order in which to learn things; originally while it defined was also abstract enough to potentially make it hard to grok.

The best part I like is the second half of the book. The action lists’. After reading and failing and reading and trying and reading and succeeding a couple of times with the main site I was able to figure out each of the action list steps on my own. The QRG goes ahead and lays it on out what you should do and in order too.

Overall the QRG is pretty solid e-book for the AJATT method and if you just aren’t quite able to understand the AJATT site as fast as you want I would recommend buying the e-book. Again at this point the only thing I would change is swapping learning the kana first before the kanji so you can get some use out of the kana while you are on the few months long journey of learning the kanji. So other than that one minor thing get it if you want it. I think it is worth getting since it helped me to re-enforce my thoughts on a few things that I was shaky on understanding.

If you get it let me know what you think of it.

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