The second volume in an exciting new series from Manga University --using original comic artwork to teach readers how to identify and write the mostcommon Japanese kanji ideographs -- introduces 80 kanji that all Japaneseschool children are required to learn by the time they graduate from sixthgrade. Each page features its own comic strip, kanji pronunciation guide, strokeorder, and English explanations.
While I do like these books, and I have found them to be useful in my and my families learning of kanji, they are organized in a completely non-sensical way. At the back of each book, they proclaim that they are useful in studying for the JLPT (Japanese Language Proficieny Test) exams. They are useful.. just not comprehensive. For example, Volume 1, which has 80 kanji in it to learn, (despite what the paragraph at the back of the book says) is NOT the full list of kanji you would need to learn to pass the first level exam (JLPT4). The JLPT4 test requires 103 kanji at the current time, as well as like 700 vocab words, and basic grammar and listening skills. If you were to just study this book, and nothing else, you would surely fail. At first I thought maybe the authors had just made an error and meant to say that the books were organized loosely based on the elementary school grade level. However, this is also not true. An example of this is ? (?? "hana") which is a grade level 1 kanji taught to first graders, but is in fact in Volume 2. The only other glaring problem I've found with these books is the lack of any sort of English definition lookup or table of contents. While you can look the kanji up if you know the spelling in kana, being able to look it up in English would've been really nice. However, the books are cheap and fun and pretty easy to use.
Cool book
Published by Thriftbooks.com User , 18 years ago
Nice book for the price. Looked like a lot of information. My niece thought it was great!
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