Reviews for Kanji De Manga, Volume 3: The Comic, Book That Teaches You How to Read and Write Japanese!

The average rating for Kanji De Manga, Volume 3: The Comic, Book That Teaches You How to Read and Write Japanese! based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-08-12 00:00:00 Harold Mckinney Similar to my review for the box set. This would seem like a really good idea for people learning Japanese. It's not. There are a few fatal flaws that make these books kinda worthless. 1. You kinda need to know Japanese for any of this to really sink in. Yeah, they have a translation of the text the kanji's used in, but that's not going to help you very much if you can't actually read or understand for yourself what's being said. 2. Even if you could understand Japanese, you run into the problem that the text is difficult to read. In Japanese, a mix of kanji and kana is used in sentences. The mix makes it easier to tell where one word ends and another begins (and furigana could be used), or if the mix is not used, spacing is included (often used in beginner and children's books) to tell apart the different words. Not so here. Even if they've already given you the kanji, they don't use it again outside of its page. 3. The index only contains the kanji in that book, so if you're trying to find a specific one, you'll have to sift through the different kanji de manga to find it. And rather than sort them by stroke order or like a kanji dictionary or making it easy to search by kanji, they sort it by readings. So if you find a kanji you don't know, good luck finding it in here without knowing how to read it. This index is set up assuming you can read the kanji and are just trying to find the meaning, but (at least in my experience) it's easier to remember what a kanji means than how to read it). I'll be honest, as a person who got a minor in Japanese language, I find this book pretty useless, but it does have its merits. 1. The kanji's picture is really, really big, which is very helpful (wish my textbooks had them that big), and the stroke order section is a decent size as well. 2. The idea of using the kanji in a comic to help you remember is novel and would be really helpful if it weren't so darn hard to read the comic (assuming you actually knew enough Japanese to be able to understand it). 3. The art is actually really nice for edu-manga. NOTE: This volume is NOT included in the box set, but as it has many of the same problems, the review is pretty much the same.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-11-12 00:00:00 Blaine Whiting See my review for Volume 1.