A Japanese Reader: Graded Lessons for Mastering the Written Language

What makes this book different to for example Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text and similar Japanese reading books, is that this book by Miller can be used by beginners of Japanese, whereas the others are strictly for intermediate students with around 1 year of study behind them. This book starts by teaching you Hiragana and Katakana, very thoroughly I might add. So even people completely new to Japanese can start using this book, together with their main textbook. Next, the book starts to introduce Kanji to the reader. In each lesson the student has a list of words (Kanji) to learn and corresponding reading passages. In total 1850 Kanji are taught in this little book, with their most common on/kun readings, this comes very close to the ~ 2000 Kanji required for everyday use in Japan. There are 75 lessons in this book, each with its own reading passage(s). The book will not show you how to draw each Kanji, nor will it explain any major grammatical points, although it will show you a few verb-conjugations and such. The Kanji taught are not introduced in a graded manner; most other books would start with simple Kanji, meaning those containing the minimum amount of strokes, and build upwards to those containing many strokes. This book does not do that, which could be a problem to some beginners, but nothing persistence won't cure. The book shows you the context of words and will give you a very broad vocabulary range: besides everyday words it includes words specific to; Shintoism, Japanese theater, military, politics, business etc. A particular thing that I like about this book are the notes, they are a wealth of information into both Japanese script and Japanese culture. As mentioned by a previous reviewer, this is not a book you can progress in at your own choosing, it has to be matched with the grammatical knowledge you get from your regular textbook: as your grammar skills improve, reading-passages in this book will be unlocked. Think of it like a game - you can only get to certain areas and do certain quests once you have enough skill-points. In this case, your skill points are your "development of grammatical understanding", i.e. how much grammar you understand. What all this means in the end, is that for a very small cost you get a book that you can use for years to come. You don't have to be a financial wizard to figure out that you are getting a bargain with this book. It is true that some of the Kanji are out-of-date, but if you have an equal interest in the country's culture and if you are thinking in the long-term, then you will need to know these expressions and Kanji at some point or another. Besides, your regular textbooks in Japanese should be the ones responsible for teaching you modern Kanji and expressions, not a book like this: this book and others like it are not substitutions for your textbooks but complements to them. If you are at the intermediate level or above then this

The first thing you have to ask yourself before picking up "A Japanese Reader", is just how serious are you about reading Japanese? If all you want is to be able to whip through some manga, then this isn't the book for you. If want to be able to handle a Japanese newspaper, or read Kawabata Yasunari and Mishima Yukio in their original language, then this is going to be a tool that will help get you there. Roy Miller's book is definitely university-level study, and is academic in nature. He references Florence Sakade's classic "Guide to Reading and Writing Japanese", and this book really works best when the two are used in conjunction. He gives Sakada numbers for much of the new kanji when it is introduced, so the reader can reference and practice the unfamiliar characters. . The range of articles goes from the very basic level, with reading practice for hiragana and katakana, and works up to the very advanced level, such as doing academic research in Japanese. In the introduction, Miller states that he assumes most students learning Japanese to that level will be interested in Japanese culture as well, and all of the articles are Japan-themed. It starts to get serious around the Elementary level, with articles such as "The essence of the Bunraku puppet theater" and "Genre painting of the 16th and 17th centuries". The real fun begins with the Advanced:Fiction section, where the student tackles literary masterpieces like Mishima's "The Sound of Waves", Kawabata's "Snow Country" and Tanizaki's "The Makioka Sisters". The Advanced:Non-Fiction section will challenge almost any Japanese learner, and is representative of true fluency. Articles on finance, politics and T'ang poetry are typical. The main complaint with "The Japanese Reader" is that it is outdated, and this is true. The book comes from a different, more demanding period and that style is thick and heavy, different from a more modern "user-friendly" style of education However, that can be overcome. To me, the real problem lies in its length. This should really be a series of graded readers, rather than a single book. Either you have a high level of ability meaning the earlier beginner lessons are unnecessary, or you are at an earlier stage, unable to make use of the majority of Miller's lessons. I have found that it is not a book to be read straight through, but to be studied, reading the same sections over and over again until mastered, then put aside to be picked up again when that level is reached. This is something really lacking in Japanese studies. This same style of graded reader would be an absolute must if it were split into three or more volumes, each one providing several examples at the appropriate level. However, this necessary reference does not exist, and "A Japanese Reader" is one of the few, if not the only, Japanese readers that does graded reading exercises.

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.

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.

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