Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105715 in Books
• Published on: 1997-12-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

Synopsis
This set of 75 graded readings provide an introduction to the writing system used in Japan.

Customer Reviews

Fast-paced and somewhat dated...but ohh so thorough!
Although the contents of many of the lessons seem to echo WWII era sensibilities, this petite volume (originally published in 1962) is absolutely overflowing with high quality material for the serious student of Japanese. In a very brief 250 pages, Mr. Miller whisks us from the rudiments of the Japanese writing system (hiragana and katakana) all the way through to dense and highly advanced excerpts from newspapers and classic Japanese novels. The book is effectively split into two distinct sections. Starting at the "front" of the book are detailed English notes and vocabularies for each lesson; beginning at the "back" of the book and working inward are the original Japanese language texts. The introductory chapters follow Samuel E. Martin's "Essential Japanese" and consist largely of standard grammatical sentence patterns. As the lessons progress in difficulty the texts move to fairy tales, conversations, and eventually to unabridged native texts. The pace of the book is absolutely blistering and all but the most motivated students will be left gasping for breath. For the serious scholar, however, this is a classic. They truly don't make them like this anymore.

can be used by absolute beginners
What makes this book different to for example Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text and similar Japanese reading books, is that this book by Miller can be used by beginners of Japanese, whereas the others are strictly for intermediate students with around 1 year of study behind them.

This book starts by teaching you Hiragana and Katakana, very thoroughly I might add. So even people completely new to Japanese can start using this book, together with their main textbook.

Next, the book starts to introduce Kanji to the reader.
In each lesson the student has a list of words (Kanji) to learn and corresponding reading passages.

There are 75 lessons in this book, each with its own reading passage(s).
The book will not show you how to draw each Kanji, nor will it explain any major grammatical points, although it will show you a few verb-conjugations and such.

The Kanji taught are not introduced in a graded manner; most other books would start with simple Kanji, meaning those containing the minimum amount of strokes, and build upwards to those containing many strokes.
This book does not do that, which could be a problem to some beginners, but nothing persistence won't cure.

The book shows you the context of words and will give you a very broad vocabulary range: besides everyday words it includes words specific to; Shintoism, Japanese theater, military, politics, business etc.

A particular thing that I like about this book are the notes, they are a wealth of information into both Japanese script and Japanese culture.

As mentioned by a previous reviewer, this is not a book you can progress in at your own choosing, it has to be matched with the grammatical knowledge you get from your regular textbook: as your grammar skills improve, reading-passages in this book will be unlocked.
Think of it like a game - you can only get to certain areas and do certain quests once you have enough skill-points.
In this case, your skill points are your "development of grammatical understanding", i.e. how much grammar you understand.

What all this means in the end, is that for a very small cost you get a book that you can use for years to come. You don't have to be a financial wizard to figure out that you are getting a bargain with this book.

It is true that some of the Kanji are out-of-date, but if you have an equal interest in the country's culture and if you are thinking in the long-term, then you will need to know these expressions and Kanji at some point or another.

Besides, your regular textbooks in Japanese should be the ones responsible for teaching you modern Kanji and expressions, not a book like this: this book and others like it are not substitutions for your textbooks but complements to them.
If you are at the intermediate level or above then this should also not be your only source of Japanese reading material on your shelf, you should have a number of them.

There are very few books like this one available - a truly graded reader for all levels - and I have yet to find a modern one.
So you can either wait and hope that one day a modern updated book will be published or you accept the limitations of what is available and make the best of it.