Hello [I am Lothar of the Hill People]! And welcome to the 0th edition of what many people are calling “The Oprah’s Book Club of the Internet, but without the charm, influence or relevance, and mostly in Japanese anyway…”.
A lot of people have asked me for book recommendations. And I struggle with this. On the one hand, I hate being told what to do, and I don’t want to tell people what to do — the whole of AJATT can be summed up in one phrase: “if it’s in Japanese, then it’s good”; that’s the only “condition” or “rule” if you will. Also, my books reflect my tastes, I mean, this is the difference between a typical class environment and doing stuff alone — you don’t have to read that lowest-common-denominator crap about “hey, what’s your major?”, and “Hello, I’m Tanaka Tarou from the ABC company”.
Speaking of interests, I hardly read any novels. Generally speaking, novels and me are not friends. I skip to the last page and try to get myself an executive summary before my next board meeting, nome same? Hehe…mmmm.
Having said all that, there are a ton of Japanese books out there, and when you’re just starting out, it can be a challenge to tell what books are worth getting. Especially if you’re buying exclusively online, and don’t have a chance to, skim, scan and sample the books in question.
So I’ve come up with a compromise: every month I’m going to just リストアップ (list up) the books I’m currently reading, or books I have previously read and really liked, and think you might enjoy. And give you a line or two about why I liked them. Sometimes I might even put up books I hated, but that were interesting.
By the way, I was inspired to do this by the Yamaneko Honyaku Club, which, while now apparently inactive, gave me some super useful book recommendations when I was walking up the Japanese hillock of literacy. Check it out.
Levels
I hate levels. For one thing, they’re all just made up anyway. And who the phork’s business is it what you read? If you’re 7 years old and you want to read War and Peace , then read War and Peace (note to all 7-year-olds: this book is about as entertaining as a 1000-page album of other people’s baby pictures in dim light; you’re not falling asleep because you’re stupid, it’s just that this book is indeed boring; remember, if you’re not sad that the book is ending (I’m running out of pages!), then it’s not a fun book for you). You, too, can enjoy any Japanese reading material at basically any time in your Japanese process.
Besides, that, no matter how “simple” a book in terms of level, if it’s boring, then game over. And no matter how supposedly “complex” a book, if you’re enjoying it, then you = teh winn0r. Remember, always give priority to your interests over your level. Something you’re interested in means you’re going to have domain knowledge. A science manga may be hard to read…unless you’re a scientist. As Nick Hornby hinted, it really isn’t that intellectually taxing for a physicist [someone who has extensive domain knowledge in physics] to read a physics book.
Nevertheless, I mean, it is, I guess, a fact that one goes through phases in one’s language development. So…so…(do you like how I write this as it comes?) here are some…some…(you like it?) arbitrary levels I pulled out of my…my…mind, with some reference to my current Cantonese experience. The numbers are nothing but a rough guide, and they may be completely wrong, and truth be told, I don’t know if I’m actually going to use them or not in the end, but here they are just for kicks anyway.
- Egg [0 – 500 sentences/fun listening hours] — pure n00bology, learning the very basics
- Caterpillar [500 – 1500 sentences/fun listening hours] — know all the basics
- Chrysalis [1500 – 5000 sentences/fun listening hours] — that magical intermediate phase, that strange stage where you understand maybe 75-80% of randomly picked authentic material, which is really good, but at the same time not yet enough to actually comprehend something new and raw in its entirety, since this still implies ignorance of every fourth or fifth word.
- Butterfly (you’ flyin’, baby!) [5000+ sentences/fun listening hours] — at this stage, you’re pretty comfortable with lots of stuff, you know far more than you don’t, and the words you are acquiring are of increasing rarity (low frequency).
- Daoist Butterfly — you’re no longer sure whether you’re a Japanese person who dreamed she was gaijin, or a gaijin who dreamed she was Japanese. This is native-level fluency. 本でも書け、ゴルァ！
yay! i remember emailing you about this a while back cheers dude
I would appreciate it if you would do this. I don’t think anyone would hold you accountable if they end up not liking something that you’ve read (Where do you live again?)
Just like you mentioned, for people outside of Japan (like myself), without being able to walk into a bookstore, it’s hard enough trying to finding reading material that matches one’s interests let alone determining if something is worth buying.
A list like this would at least give us some ideas that we can investigate. Speaking of the list…….any idea when we’ll see it?
I would like to see your blog posts in Japanese. I’m not going to stoop to presuming how easy it would be to bang out a Japanese version of each post, but I think you could give us a “parent to child” style simplistic Japanese version of many posts that many of us would appreciate (in other words, if they aren’t chock full of slang, many more Japanese learners could appreciate them). That is not to say I don’t appreciate what you have already done, you really have given us so much already.
日本語で勝元さんのブログを読みたい。他の言語で書くのは難しいかもしれないけど、優しい日本語で書かれた記事は面白いと思うよ。つまり、前の日本語の記事のような慣用語句いっぱい記事じゃなければ、みんなが日本語文章を読みながら勝元さんの知識と教えを学べる。
Danielさん（Karate Kidかっ！！）
コメント、ありがとう御座います。
先ずは訂正。
>優しい
この場合はヤッパリ「易しい」です。変換のミスでしょうね。:)
>前の日本語の記事のような慣用語句いっぱい記事じゃなければ
そうかなぁ。要するに、AJATTの内容を題材にした「リーダー」みたいな奴？
解かりました。検討に入れさせて貰います。
でもね！でもね！でもね！それじゃ、多少日本語のナチュラルさが止む無く失われるだろう？それ、どう思う？
ご意見お願いします！
I have to say I disagree with Daniel. I’ve been a fan of this blog for a long time but I much prefer the AJATT articles to be in English. No matter how good Khatzumoto’s Japanese undoubtedly is, I’ve never felt comfortable reading Japanese written by foreigners. Also, it’s nice to be able to run through RSS feeds quickly rather than taking the extra time it takes to read Japanese. Furthermore, not all AJATT readers can read Japanese well yet. By writing in English, you’re letting beginners and also students of other languages access your blog. Remember that there are lots of readers here who use and support AJATT for learning Arabic, French and other languages completely unrelated to Japanese.
Hi Khatzumoto,
Thank you for the correction (and I also like when people point out the karate kid thing “Your the best! AROUND!”) I never put it together that 優しい and 易しい were two different words. Perhaps they share the same やまとことば. This book comes to mind, one I was thinking about purchasing:
www.amazon.co.jp/%E3%81%B2%E3%82%89%E3%81%8C%E3%81%AA%E3%81%A7%E3%82%88%E3%82%81%E3%81%B0%E3%82%8F%E3%81%8B%E3%82%8B%E6%97%A5%E6%9C%AC%E8%AA%9E%E3%81%AE%E3%81%B5%E3%81%97%E3%81%8E-%E4%B8%AD%E8%A5%BF-%E9%80%B2/dp/4093874522/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221792687&sr=8-1
とにかく、ナチュラルと易しいとは反対じゃないと思う。もちろん、大人の会話に使える表現と親子の会話のは違うけど、両方とも自然でしょう？ブログの読者たちが日本語の子供だって言ったでしょう！ あるいは、僕だけのレベルは子供と同じだ。。。Anyway, I know you put a lot of work into this site, so you don’t have to humor my requests!
Alec, I was suggesting dual English/Japanese versions.
> Daoist Butterfly — you’re no longer sure whether you’re a Japanese person who dreamed she was gaijin, or a gaijin who dreamed she was Japanese.
HAHA! 😀
(I like the new site logo btw)
Hopefully my next message will be in japanese!
Thanks Khatzumoto!