My Books

Over the years I have collected some pretty good (and not so good) books on the topics of the Japanese language and culture, so I thought I'd list them here.

It all started with 'Japanese in Mangaland' by Marc Bernabe, which is a nice book to get started with, as it touches on the most important topics and teaches you the most important words and sentences. All of this coupled with examples from manga books.

My bible is 'Remembering the Kanji 1' by James Heisig. I've written about this book before, you can find that post here. It's the best method I know for learning Kanji. It teaches you the writing and meaning of the most common kanji. When working with it, this website was also a lot of help.

The next book I have is 'Remembering the Kanji 2' which is the follow-up to part 1 (duh) and teaches you the pronunciation of the kanji learnt in book 1.

I also have 'Essential Japanese' by Berlitz publishers. This also teaches you the most important sentences and grammatical structures, but I haven't worked much from it. I prefer the website of Tae Kim for learning grammar.

Two books I've recently bought are 'All About Particles' by Naoko Chino and 'Making Sense of Japanese' by Jay Rubin. The former one is about particles, which is basically the hardest part of Japanese grammar. Particles indicate whether something is the topic of the sentence, you can use them to express things like 'also' and 'at/in', but sometimes it's very obscure which ones to use where. Hopefully that book will help me.
I've only just started 'Making Sense of Japanese', but it's subtitle: 'What the textbooks don't tell you', and the introduction by the author, in which he states that the Japanese language is not 'vague' seem very promising.

I've also got some dictionaries: '501 Japanese Verbs' from Barron's. Ever since Eddie bought this in Amsterdam two years ago I've wanted it as well, so I decided to just buy it at some point. It has most of the inflections of the verbs and their informal and formal usages.
The 'Oxford Beginner's Japanese dictionary' and 'Oxford Japanese Grammar and Verbs' were birthday presents from Eddie that I've used quite a lot.

Then I've got a brilliant book called 'Japanese Made Funny', by Tom Dillon. It's a hilarious book about people mixing up words and saying something completely different than they'd intended. I bought that in Japan, along with 'The Japanese Mind', by Roger Davies. This book explains certain aspects of the Japanese culture that are difficult for foreigners to understand.

Another treasure of mine is 'A gaijin's guide to Japan'. 'Gaijin' means foreigner (literally: outside person), and it explains all kinds of things, mostly from modern culture, in a fun and concise way.

I've got a little book called 'Living Japanese Style' which explains Japanese etiquette in a humorous manner.

I've also got a little book called 'How to sound intelligent in Japanese', which teaches you such things as 'I told the club president that in my opinion the rule barring women as members should be reconsidered', etc. XD

I've got a box with cards with opposites on them; the word for 'large' and a picture of an elephant on one side, and the word for 'small' and a picture of a mouse on the other side, stuff like that.

Then I've got some books about food: 'The Manga Cookbook' which has recipes for all kinds of cute stuff, like octopus-shaped sausages and eggs with faces, etc. And I've got a book called 'Japanese restaurants' which I should have brought on my trip with me, as it would have been a great help. It shows which types of restaurants sell what, how to recognise them, and how to write the food items in kanji (so you can also recognise them).

I think that's enough for now. Better use the books I have before buying any new ones, though there are still a few that I want... XD