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Japanese learning material (books)

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8 Dec 2006
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Hey everyone. :)

I'm currently studying and working at the same time. Both work place and university are quite far from each others and from my home, meaning that I spend daily about 3 to 4 hours on metro, bus, boat or just walking. The best part is that I currently have plenty of time for Japanese study every day. :)

This fact, however, made my studying material shift, from tools and websites, to books and printed paper. Something that, surprisingly, I found to be extremely beneficial to my learning curve. I'm currently using Genki at my Japanese classes and I just bought Kanji & Kana from Tuttle Publishing to improve my kanji understanding as I'm completely amazed and eager to learn more about them.

While I learned (still not finished :p) verbs, adjectives, particles, sentence construction, etc, I noticed (hopefully right) that the most difficult barrier to overcome will be the generalized lack of vocabulary. So, I decided, as suggested by a friend, to start reading Japanese raw manga. I was a bit disoriented as I never read a single manga (japanese or otherwise) in all my life. But I managed to find and download a fairly decent quality manga from the internet. (in terms of image definition - who could tell furigana would be so damn hard to read anyway? :p)

This turned to be a terrible new challenge. After more than a month, didn't even manage to end the first page. 😌

I decided that this meant war and I want to, out of stubbornness, read not only that first page but the entire comic. So my next step will be to buy a hand Japanese dictionary and use it to break the comic, page by page, sentence by sentence. :devilish:

Still, I'm foreseeing that more study material will be needed in the future although I'm not sure which. None of my Japanese class colleagues have a dictionary or any experience at reading raw manga, although some can recite entire mangas/animes in English/Portuguese. :erm: Anyway, this to say that I'm a bit lost in all this read raw manga stuff and I'm mainly trying (main word in this sentence :p) to do it by trial and error.

First, I would love to have a recommended English-Japanese/Japanese-English hand dictionary, one that I can take in my bag with me every time. One that doesn't weight like 10 tons.

I also wanted some feedback on how to proceed with the studies from now on. Is reading raw manga a good idea after all? Should I get more learning material ASAP or focus on something else than vocabulary?

Also, as I'm planning to visit japan around march/april, I would like to know if there is something you could advice me to get to ease my stay here. Something like those english books: "Learn surviving English in 15 minutes" :p

Thank you for reading.
Sorry for all the rambling. 😊
 
I'm in a similar situation to you in terms of what I want to learn, and at what stage i'm at. My brother got me an English-Japanese dictionary for christmas (Berlitz) and its nto too big or heavy but contains a hell of a lot of words (its just like a normal dictionary in terms of layout) and also lists all kana and the recommended 2000 kanji at the beginning which is quite useful for quick lookups.

Type in "Berlitz" and "japanese" in amazon and it's the concise dictionary (I dont have enough posts to post links o_O).
 
Try nippon-export.com for manga, simply because if you read raw manga with furigana your eyesight will decline FAST, and im serious.
On the other hand, If you want to wear glasses that badly, or want stronger ones check out gotlurk.net for a flood of manga, and obviously loads of raw.
 
Dictionary

First, I would love to have a recommended English-Japanese/Japanese-English hand dictionary, one that I can take in my bag with me every time. One that doesn't weight like 10 tons.

I use Sanseido's Daily Concise. This little one includes everything. Although you need a really good kanji skill.

I forgot to ask...where in Japan are you planning to visit?
 
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