Reading-Japanese-Eleanor-Harz-Jorden: Is it good?

[James_dean]

Reading Japanese

I took 2 kyuu this year and have found that my reading ability is lacking somewhat in understanding exactly what sentences mean and also kanji that i don`t know so i want to be able to improve my reading ability so that i can understand written japanese text more fully than now. The above book looks good for improving my overall reading ability. Has anyone used this is it what i need?.

Edit - Learn to use URL tags, especially for absurdly long links like that - the Management.

[Shirasagi]

I used it in college when we'd completed the field test edition of Jorden & Noda's "Japanese: The Written Language".

I'm not exactly sure how well the book would work for self-study. I'm pretty sure it's designed for a classroom. Also, the book is 31 years old, so the Japanese is just a bit dated. But the readings are excellent, particularly because many of them are in this handwritten font that I hated. Oh, I hated it, but reading that damn font really helped me acclimate to regular handwritten Japanese (which doesn't look a whole heck of a lot like typeset Japanese). Best of all, all the readings are authentic.

That said, I don't know if finishing RJ would bring you up to 2 kyuu kanji level. Chris Kern (Yudan Taiteki) is the guy to ask, I think.

[James_dean]

Japanese: The Written Language".

whats this like

[Yudan Taiteki]

J:WL is the updated version of Reading Japanese; same principle, newer text. Unfortunately it's still a field test edition so there are some mistakes.

I think it's a pretty good book. It only covers 400 or 425 kanji, but it also gets you to practice actual reading. It assumes a lot of grammatical knowledge because it's made to work with Japanese: The Spoken Language.

If you passed 2-kyuu it's probably too low level for you. I recommend Kanji In Context.