When Ken met Michiko...
Oct. 14th, 2008 06:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khiemtranI'm going to be in Osaka on Saturday, so I've dusted off my old copy of Ballhatchet and Kaiser's Teach Yourself Japanese. It's been fun to read it again and catch up with the various characters - the aforementioned Ken and Michiko, the suspiciously alcohol-prone Tomu and Anzai-sensei and the forgetful Mrs Anzai.
One thing I'd forgotten is just how dense the book is. I'm only up to chapter thirteen, and I've already come across plenty of grammatical concepts that I'd completely forgotten. There are also quite a few things that I've learned independently in the subsequent years that turned out to have been in the book all the time. There was also a surprisingly amount of informal Japanese, although not really presented in a way in a way that will help it stick. Like many Japanese learners, I started exclusively on Teineigo and then found it was next to useless for understanding movies or casual conversations.
The other interesting aspect is the things which were left out of "a complete course for beginners". The book is entirely in Romaji and there's not even a mention of hiragana or katakana until the second last page before the index. As such, it's probably not a really a "complete course" and it certainly needs to be complemented with a lot of dialogue to build up your ear for actual spoken Japanese, but it is still a useful book and handy for covering a lot of the basics very thoroughly.
One thing I'd forgotten is just how dense the book is. I'm only up to chapter thirteen, and I've already come across plenty of grammatical concepts that I'd completely forgotten. There are also quite a few things that I've learned independently in the subsequent years that turned out to have been in the book all the time. There was also a surprisingly amount of informal Japanese, although not really presented in a way in a way that will help it stick. Like many Japanese learners, I started exclusively on Teineigo and then found it was next to useless for understanding movies or casual conversations.
The other interesting aspect is the things which were left out of "a complete course for beginners". The book is entirely in Romaji and there's not even a mention of hiragana or katakana until the second last page before the index. As such, it's probably not a really a "complete course" and it certainly needs to be complemented with a lot of dialogue to build up your ear for actual spoken Japanese, but it is still a useful book and handy for covering a lot of the basics very thoroughly.
