Reading Japanese Financial Newspapers =

Though currently out of print, this textbook from Kodansha is quite excellent and well worth tracking down for students of Japanese eager to reach an advanced level of control in the language. Very few "Advanced" textbooks really do much to help you with anything other than the specific stories or articles that they provide as examples. "Reading Japanese Financial Newspapers," however, is extremely effective at getting the new vocabulary and kanji compounds in your head keeping what you learn in the front of your mind. I am an actor, not a businessman, but this book has helped tremendously in making the leap forward to reading contemporary newspapers, novels, and essays in Japan. That said, this is NOT for the beginner. You must already have a firm grasp of hiragana, katakana, and basic kanji. This textbook will make the difference for those who have mastered basic and have a relatively firm grip on intermediate Japanese. At the beginning you should feel that much of the material is repetition of more vague words that you've already experienced in some capacity. However, the book moves at a very quick pace, cementing those aspects for a strong foundation upon which to gain control of the more advanced language that comes soon after. If you're new to the language or just finished the beginning phase, try another more basic textbook. But for the already fairly experienced Japanese student, this book is more than worth the search.

My advice is to use Jordan's Reading Japanese as a starting point, and eventually move on to Reading Japanese Financial Newspapers. I struggled with this text for quite some time, but eventually emerged literate enough to read Nikkei Shimbun pretty comfortably...

I got this book hoping that it would give a boost to my newspaper reading ability... It did. Although I already knew almost all the Joyo kanji, I didn't know a laaarge number of the terms commonly used in newspapers... especially the financial terms. This book greatly helped in remedying that... The most important thing you should know is that this book _isn't_ just about finance -- it's about almost everything in japanese newspapers, including sentence structure and common idioms... And at any rate, it's much nicer to skim by boring financial articles knowing that you could read them if you wanted to ... If you are frustrated with newspapers, get this book. It won't do everything for you, but it'll do a lot... And it's easy to work through, especially if you're looking at papers all the time trying to read them... ;)