[.ca] Japanese Reader (ISBN 0804816476)

Slightly dated, but solid, intermediate-to-advanced reader:
This book was written in the late 1950's and shows its age slightly in both the choice of selections and in its pedagogical style; however, I found the latter portions to be a valuable resource for learning to read Japanese works written in the "interstitial" period after WWII, but before the "modern" style took complete hold in Japanese literature. As such, many archaic kan'ji and out-of-use phrases are present in the cited works; however, it is important for the student of Japanese literature to have exposure to these forms in addition to the modern style.

Heavy Duty Reader for the Committed:
This is an excellent primer on written Japanese, but it is not for the fainthearted! It is true that it is a bit dated (a lot of stuff from the fifties included) but it covers the field of written Japanese extensively in an extremely small amount of space. If (like me) you took up Japanese after you had already learned to read Chinese, you'll probably find this book a useful way to jump into reading while avoiding going through the basics of the writing system all over again. The book also covers a lot of details on the writing system (proper names, furigana principals, pre-1945 standard usage) that you can spend a lot of time looking for in other books, often to no avail. If you're really serious about getting into reading Japanese, it's a good book to work with, but be warned - it moves along at a vicious pace.

Not the tool for mastery:
I have been studying Japanese for over ten years now and of all the books I own in and on the language, this is by far the most outdated and least user-friendly. I definitely agree with previous reviews that point out that the pace from basic sentences along the lines of "I like French movies" to articles on unglazed pottery and explanations on capitalism makes for daunting, if not defeating, study. The texts themselves, while interesting to the dedicated student, are rather dry and full of archaic terms that the general Japanese person would either not use or would have trouble recognizing in a text without the appropriate furigana. Without sound previous knowledge of Japanese, it should be difficult for the average learner to estimate which words are really worth memorizing and which ones one might never encounter again outside of this reader. The greatest drawback, however, is that this "reader" is unreadable without the help of a good Japanese dictionary. Only words in Kanji (with the *occasional* kana exception) are listed in the glossary accompanying each chapter, and in later lessons even some of those terms (which are rather difficult, by all accounts) do no longer make it into the vocabulary lists which leaves the reader to his own devices for figuring out reading and meaning. (And not having a rather technical dictionary, some of these terms cannot be found in more general Japanese-English dictionaries). All in all, I really wish Tuttle would update and expand on what initially was a great idea. Obviously, every serious student of Japanese should eventually be able to read the texts presented in this volume, but the road to "mastering the language" is not made easier by using this book.

Fast-paced and somewhat dated...but ohh so thorough!:
Although the contents of many of the lessons seem to echo WWII era sensibilities, this petite volume (originally published in 1962) is absolutely overflowing with high quality material for the serious student of Japanese. In a very brief 250 pages, Mr. Miller whisks us from the rudiments of the Japanese writing system (hiragana and katakana) all the way through to dense and highly advanced excerpts from newspapers and classic Japanese novels. The book is effectively split into two distinct sections. Starting at the "front" of the book are detailed English notes and vocabularies for each lesson; beginning at the "back" of the book and working inward are the original Japanese language texts. The introductory chapters follow Samuel E. Martin's "Essential Japanese" and consist largely of standard grammatical sentence patterns. As the lessons progress in difficulty the texts move to fairy tales, conversations, and eventually to unabridged native texts. The pace of the book is absolutely blistering and all but the most motivated students will be left gasping for breath. For the serious scholar, however, this is a classic. They truly don't make them like this anymore

Dated and too fast-paced:
This book was first printed in 1962, and it really shows, with many examples of old-style orthography and few examples that will be useful to modern students. The book progresses from the fundamentals of the writing system to "Liberalization Plans in Foreign Trade Exchange" and "The Forms of T'ang Poetry" in less than two hundred pages, leaving little room for explanation. As a result, this book might be a useful textbook within the context of an advanced class, but it's not of much use to students studying on their own. It's also worth noting that nearly all of my Japanese books, including everything from novels to popular texts on psychology, are easier than even the 'intermediate' articles in this reader; this book is more liable to scare off students (even relatively advanced ones) than to provide either education or interesting reading materials.