The reviews on Amazon had been pretty encouraging so I bought book 1. The thing with this book is that it doesn’t have anything to help you pronounce the words properly. I have been watching non-dubbed Japanese anime/film/dramas for nearly 15 years now and I hope I have learnt a small amount of correct pronounciation by, err… osmosis.

Like Arabic, it is pointless to learn Japanese without learning to read and write Japanese – an extra challenge when compared to learning European languages. Hence, the other reason why I felt this book was kinda good as it aims to progressively make you learn the hiragana script as you get on with the lessons. For example, if you start by learning ‘Nan desu-ka?’ (Japanese for ‘what is it?’) early on, in later chapters you find the book’s text for the same phrase is written ‘Nan desu か?’, and so on until the whole phrase is written as ‘なんですか?’.

The book can be used together with the YesJapan.com website run by the author. For those who worry about pronounciation, the lessons mirrored in the website have the words linked to an audio tag. The site’s also peppered with videos about general questions on speaking Japanese and bits on the culture. The thing is the site’s only free for the first few chapters of the book I think. Oh well.

Where have I got to now? The basic greetings, ‘my name is ….’ and ‘how old are you’ are all dealt with. I know how to name parts of the face and what bed, toothbrush, towel and soap is in nihongo. And I can count. Up to a million.

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