Comments on: You Can’t Afford Not To Buy Japanese Books

By: Tyson Key

Tyson Key — Sat, 29 Dec 2012 00:57:55 +0000

I thought earlier that trying to learn to ride a bicycle, without having access to one; or trying to drink water from an empty cup might be vaguely suitable analogies.

By: Bradley Curry

Bradley Curry — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 00:34:59 +0000

Hi Thomas Smith and Sholum,

Do either of you (or anyone else that has shunned paper books for MCD material) have access to a scanner? If so and you don’t mind the hassle, you can e-mail a scan to me and I’ll type it up so you can make flash cards. I think it’d be good for my typing and vocabulary skills (hard to type a kanji you don’t know how to pronounce)

By: Think, Live, Read Like an Athelete: Stopwatch Action | Samurai Mind Online

Think, Live, Read Like an Athelete: Stopwatch Action | Samurai Mind Online — Sun, 24 Jun 2012 12:53:59 +0000

[…] reading’s Khatzumoto’s article, You Can’t Afford Not to Buy Japanese Books article, I hustled my samurai patootie to Bookoff, a Japanese used book store in Manhattan. I […]

By: taijuando

taijuando — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 11:14:33 +0000

I was thinking of going to Book Off last night. But I was watching Nausicaa with the English subs off and cozy on my couch and wondering WTF is the plot? Every now and then I understood what they were saying and then I didn’t. I don’t understand many Ghibli movies even with English. But oh, the purty pictures. I will get off the couch and buy more books!

By: Strawberry Vibe

Strawberry Vibe — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 18:46:30 +0000

In my opinion – which isn’t worth much – it may be a good idea to finish the kanji first before trying to read a book. It may be a valid idea to get books beforehand so they’re present when you need them, but I think you may be discouraged trying to read before having your kanji down.

That being said, online, you can probably find things like Japanese fairy tales that are written purely in hiragana.

By: Chris Dando

Chris Dando — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 09:39:39 +0000

I’m not quite sure where to start. I’ve tried to play pokemon in Japanese but I’ve played it before so I just get bored. what I really want is a great fork of Japanese fiction. I know my hiragana and I want to work on my kanji, got any suggestions for a great Japanese book?

By: 魔法少女☆かなたん

魔法少女☆かなたん — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 11:38:19 +0000

Random search queries in google.co.jp. Find an interesting word or phrase, search, and visit a few of the links. Sometimes it’s awesome.

By: Rout

Rout — Sun, 27 May 2012 15:00:28 +0000

Some people prefer paper books. I, for example, strongly dislike reading manga or ebooks on the computer screen.

By: Sholum

Sholum — Sun, 27 May 2012 01:05:46 +0000

Alright, it works well! Now I can read my books and not have to search forever when I don’t know or have forgotten a word. It should also be easier to make decks with new vocabulary now too.

That’s what I meant to do this for and it looks like it will work just fine!

By: Amanda Japanda

Amanda Japanda — Sat, 26 May 2012 12:46:34 +0000

Do you really have to spend money on books? There are so many ways to get free reading material online.

By: Carl

Carl — Wed, 23 May 2012 21:53:38 +0000

That link about being ghetto made me rofl’ed. I always appreciate your humor and how you share your ideas. (So, one Korean book + timeboxing = a steady investment in my Korean bank). Thanks for this article.

By: Sholum

Sholum — Mon, 21 May 2012 02:19:11 +0000

Just figured out how to add the line breaks automatically in Notepad++ so this will be a breeze to complete!

By: Sholum

Sholum — Mon, 21 May 2012 01:36:54 +0000

I’ve decided to try something in order to make it easier to read books before you know tons of words. I’m going to undertake the painstaking procedure of converting an E-book to HTML. Why? Because I want Rikaichan and Denshi Jisho to be at my fingertips while reading and I want to be able to easily copy and paste sentences to make MCDs.

So I’ve got my copy of ハリーポッターと賢者の石 and I’ve converted it into a .txt document. I decided to go by chapter and to add an overarching directory to use with all of the books, but it’s unnecessary.

Anyway, my current method of keeping the format the same as the book involves me copying and pasting “
” onto every line of text.
It’s a pain.
Does anyone know of a way to add code to the beginning of every line in a document other than painstakingly copying and pasting?

Obviously, I’m not distributing this. I just thought it’d be interesting to share the idea assuming I can find a way to add a line break for every line without losing the use of my fingers.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 18 May 2012 02:49:36 +0000

Agreed, but, at least initially, get books that have an English version you can use for a contextual translation of the Japanese (or whatever language you’re studying), fantastically useful. I like Harry Potter, it’s available in 60-some-odd langauges and doesn’t use overly complex or obscure language since it’s written for kids but it’s very entertaining and interesting whether you’re a kid or an adult.
Oh, and once you’ve learned enough of the language to be able to write simple sentences (shouldn’t take more than a few hours), get on Lang-8 and start WRITING in it, this forces you to learn how to actually use the language, not just interpret it.

Cheers,
Andrew

By: Aaron

Aaron — Thu, 17 May 2012 19:25:47 +0000

For anyone interested I just happen to have about 2000 Japanese paperbacks that I picked up recently. Way too many for me to read myself. I am selling some of them off in lots of 10 for $25 USD, and I’ll pay for shipping in the contiguous US. I will ship them international, but I won’t cover shipping fees on those sales. See my post under books on the AJATT plus forums, or just shoot me an email (jatznic@yahoo.com)

Happy reading =D

By: olimay

olimay — Thu, 17 May 2012 05:14:39 +0000

For those in the U.S., it appears Books Sanseido (三省堂書店) allows you to order online: http://www.mitsuwa.com/tenant/sanseido/eindex.php http://shop.mitsuwa.com/eng/egoods/eindex.php?c=13 They don't have a very wide selection, but you might be able to find something. It looks like they also offer (rather pricey) magazine subscriptions for those willing to make that extra investment.

By: Kimura

Kimura — Thu, 17 May 2012 02:40:35 +0000

If anything, you get reading and typing practice out of it. Sure, you have to manually look up kanji readings before you can type it in (as I mentioned, it’d be great if there was an IRL port of Rikaichan), but basically you’re pre-reviewing the material before you actually start “reviewing” the deck. It’s more short-term efficient to add things that are digital to begin with, yes, but I think the “you have to look stuff up as you put it in” effect is slightly more beneficial in the long term. And like ライトニング said, don’t SRS-ify material of any format the first time you read through. Go through it once, maybe mark good places to make cards from, and then go back later and pick stuff out.

Either way, use what material you want to use, and don’t give an Expletive Redacted about the source format.

By: Sholum

Sholum — Thu, 17 May 2012 00:52:50 +0000

This reminds me of a post I read over at a certain Japanese learning blog (the one where the mystical Square Fugu resides) about how most every Japanese site is designed to work on cell phones and IE6. This basically makes it so that almost all the sites not owned by huge companies are heavy on text, low on pictures, and overall look like American websites from the 90’s.

So yeah, if that’s what you were referring to, then you’re pretty much out of luck. If you’re just having trouble finding interesting content, just keep looking. It’s out there… somewhere.

Maybe you should try searching for an interesting topic on your favorite Japanese friendly search engine. Especially if it’s something that someone will blog about (which is anything, really). That way, you can read interesting blogs or follow interesting sites in Japanese instead of English (I think there’s an article about this somewhere on the site).

By: Rout

Rout — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:15:03 +0000

Slightly off-topic here (I… tend to that a lot, don’t I), but while we’re on the topic of Japanese and reading…
I used to read a lot of books, but let’s just say that since I became a *cough* citizen of the internet, I began to spend less and less time on reading books and more time on reading blogs and other random sites. I particularly like blogs about alternatives to school, and about so called “free parenting” (curious, since I’m not planning to have kids), general self-help blogs too. Also, TvTropes I’m pretty addicted to as well as creepypasta. And well, anything interesting I stumble upon. Now, the problem is, I get around the English part of the internet rather freely, but the Japanese part of it seems like a big mess to me and thus I’m having some trouble finding stuff to read. Sure, I got myself some manga and light novels, but in the end, I know it’s more probable I’ll end up reading something on the internet.

So… anyone got tips for getting around the scary jungle the Japanese internet is?

By: lc

lc — Wed, 16 May 2012 09:33:06 +0000

I was thinking like a person above me “I’ll start reading books and stuff when i’ve learnt all the kanji”, but trying to read japanese sites and etc with a shaky grasp of kana(going along one syllable at a time, was too slow).
I eventually came across the Kanon Visual Novel(I watched the anime long before I was even learning japanese) and i’ve only been playing for about 10-12 hours in total, but i’d say my reading speed has at least quadrupled, if not become 5x+ faster. You also pick up every day words from novels and stuff. I can now also read(albeit not fully understand) on the automatic scrolling level, so surely i’m doing something right?
The most important thing is to read something you’ll enjoy, even if you don’t fully understand it! Just start ASAP!