A Japanese Reader: Graded Lessons for Mastering the Written Language

by Roy Andrew Miller

This book is a selection of graded Japanese readings written in modern Japanese.

An excellent way to learn Japanese, A Japanese Reader is designed for the foreign student of Japanese who is interested in attaining and developing proficiency in reading Japanese, the style of which is in current use in books, magazines, and newspapers in Japan. It also includes authentic excerpts from works by 20th-century Japanese masters Mishima, Akutagawa, Kawabata, and others.

Although A Japanese Reader supposes some acquaintance with the spoken Japanese language, it does not assume any knowledge of written Japanese and starts from and very beginning, advancing in graded readings up through quite difficult materials. Learning the modern Japanese written language is by no means a difficult task for the student of the Japanese language as it is often made to appear. The most important thing in such a study is to get yourself started in the correct direction--after that, the progress you make and the eventual proficiency you will gain in reading (and writing) the language are limited only by the amount of time and effort you are able or willing to devote to the task. Attention has been given throughout the volume to grading materials in the order of progressive difficulty, though in many cases familiarity on the part of a student with the subject matter involved may well make a particular selection somewhat easier for him than others further on in the book. Partly to assist in the understanding of the reading selections and partly because it is felt that few students will wish to become proficient in reading Japanese and still remain uninterested in Japanese culture and cultural history, an attempt has also been made to indicate where possible significant collateral readings available in English, especially for some of the sections which deal with distinctive aspects of Japanese life and culture.

Genres: Japanese Literature, Japan, Nonfiction, Language

250 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 1990

About the author

Roy Andrew Miller was an American linguist best known as the author of several books on Japanese language and linguistics, and for his advocacy of Korean and Japanese as members of the proposed Altaic language family.

Reviews

[Jianna]

The book does a good job of introducing a wide variety of characters and does use graded lessons, so that even a complete beginner with only a knowledge of hiragana and katakana could begin using this book. However, a lot of the reading selections have rather odd themes, and the characters aren't gradually introduced in the same order that they would be taught in a classroom. Some of the vocabulary is rather odd for the average student, at least in most of the elementary - intermediate readings, and a lot of the very specialized vocabulary will probably be only used in these readings, but not in everyday conversation or while living in Japan. Intermediate students will encounter characters and vocabulary that they wouldn't normally be introduced to in most intermediate Japanese classes. I would recommend this to advanced-intermediate students who are looking to review basic kanji in the elementary readings, and then learn some old cultural terminology and be exposed to more reference Kanji than they would probably deal with in most modern Japanese classes. Another note is that once you reach Part 4: Advanced Fiction, the passages use many pre-war characters that cannot be found in most Kanji dictionaries for students of Japanese. While there is one appendix with a list of some of these characters, it does not include all the characters used in the passages.

[Velvetink · Rating 3 out of 5]

1989 ed.

[Shannon Kauderer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reasonable way to learn Kanji.