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A good book to learn from please

bento

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23 Mar 2007
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I'm currently using a book that my cousin left me (he didn't think his bro would tkae the time to learn) about four or five years ago before his family left the apartment my mom and I live in now(he went to Chiba University his sophmore (?) year to study abroad and he'd been staying with his family to cut down on expenses.


Okay, the book I'm using is called Reading and Writing and is published by Tuttle. It lists 881 "essentail characters" as listed by The Japanese Ministry of Education. Followed by 1,800 some general use characters, some kanji, then the alphabet.
With the characters, it shows stroke order, definition, examples of use, kun yomi, and on-yumi.

If you take, ichi (one) for example, it shows you how to form one month and such, but it doesn't show you in which case you'd use the kun-yomi pronounciation, or on-yumi pronounciation. For that I had to seek help in an already Japanese speaking family member.


I recognise many of the characters from a Mandarin class i took in middle school, but I'd like to know if there's a more structured book I can use besides the one I'm using now.

EDIT: Sorry.. I didn't realize there was a section for this.. forgive my n00bness
 
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It would be nice if you told us the name of the book you have now. The best book for structured learning of kanji is Remembering the Kanji, by James Heisig. I have to assume you're looking for a book to learn kanji, since you never actually told us what kind of book you're looking for.
 
It would be nice if you told us the name of the book you have now. The best book for structured learning of kanji is Remembering the Kanji, by James Heisig. I have to assume you're looking for a book to learn kanji, since you never actually told us what kind of book you're looking for.
I already did. lol
The book I'm using is called Writing and Reading Japanese. It's published by Tuttle (yes, Tuttle, not turtle).

I'd like to learn the spoken language too.. the book I have now is okay for now I guess.. but it lacks.. well, I mentioned the features in my previous post. But it's okay for learning the characters and what they stand for, but not so much speaking it; putting it simply that is.
 
I already did. lol
Terribly sorry. You certainly did.

The book I used for grammar and vocabulary when starting out is pretty good in my opinion. It's almost entirely in romaji, which is a big minus, but I think it makes up for that with the way it very clearly explains the grammar points. It's called Ultimate Japanese, Beginner-Intermediate, and it's published by Random House Living Language.
 
I can forgive you for your noobness, nobody needs to be forgiven for that, but that tl;dr (too long, didn't read) post, that didn't let me know really quickly HOW I could best answer your question, that my friend, I can NOT, forgive.
 
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