Beginning Japanese: Part 2: Amazon.ca: Professor Eleanor Harz Jorden, Hamako Ito Chaplin: Books

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13 Reviews

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4.5 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)

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2.0 out of 5 stars Thorough book, but dated and lacking kana and kanji, Feb 23 2004

By

Adam P. Fox "apfox" (Indianapolis, IN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Beginning Japanese: Part 1 (Paperback)

Well, I can say that this book is extremely thorough. It will teach you how to speak Japanese fairly well, if you can wade through it. However, I personally dislike this book.

This book is quite dated, as are all Jorden books. We're talking 40 years here. What's worst is the lack of kana. You won't be able to read Japanese at all. You can study kana and kanji on your own and in a class, but you'll never be very good at it unless you work yourself to death. Textbooks with kana and kanji in them, such as Nakama or the extremely good Genki are great in that you begin to be able to read Japanese nearly as fast as you can understand it, and kanji recognition is much easier.

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3.0 out of 5 stars This is the old version of "Japanese, the Spoken Language", Dec 29 2003

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H. Z. "unquack" (U.K.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Beginning Japanese: Part 1 (Paperback)

This book was first published in 1962 and has been completely updated in the same author's "Japanese, the Spoken Language". I highly recommend that book and can't quite understand why this book is still in print.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book for the Beginner and good for practice, April 9 2002

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Stephen M. Lerch (Elkton, MD United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Beginning Japanese: Part 1 (Paperback)

I purchased this book (Beginning Japanese Prt.1) after having read many favorable reviews of it. I must say that I am quite pleased with what this has to offer for me, as a seasoned beginner when it comes to Japanese. This book will give you many practice conversations to try out and rip apart to create your own sentences, which is extremely helpful when trying to learn the structure of a Japanese sentence. There is a TON of practice given through this book, and as any language learner will tell you, if you don't practice you don't learn.

If there is a problem with this text, it would the pronunciation and Romanizing of some of the Japanese Hiragana/Katakana. According to this book (published in 1962), there is a Hiragana/Katakana symbol for SI. Well, in the following text, they explain that it is ACTUALLY pronounce SHI (not "see" as it appears). If you look in any newer dictionary, they either omit SI or put SHI(SI) for the symbol in question as the Romanization. 2 more examples would be HU (pronounced more like FU) and TI (pronounced CHI). Had this book been written more recently or recently revised, all of the words in this text which use TI,TU,SI,HU etc.. would have been written with CHI,TSU,SHI,FU respectively. So any Romanization you see after learning from this book may look a little weird at first as it would use this method for Romanization, not the method in this text. Reading this text after having learned the pronounciations of Hiragana/Katakana, not Romanizations, made it kind of difficult for me to read the words properly without a little extra thought speak the practice samples and then to be able to write the practice converations in Hiragana/Katakana (a great way to practice and learn the pronunciations of the Hiragana/Katakana symbols... good luck with Kanji).

Even with this little Romanization problem, this book gives you what you need to learn the Japanese language effectively; lots of GREAT explanations, lots of vocabulary and TONS of practice. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn to SPEAK (not read) Japanese. I also recommend you learn to speak then pick up another text to learn to read Japanese, as just speaking the language may prove difficult to cope with if you plan on travelling to Japan.

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars The best Japanese textbook for beginners - bar none!
If you're going to study Japanese with any rigor, this is the book you need. Some people will try to use "Japanese for Busy People" or some other superficial junk like that... Read more

Published on Feb 28 2002 by Andrew B Gibian

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth buying
Been using the book in my local library in the UK because it is not on sale.

I've tried several books in several libraries but this is by far the best. Read more