しあわせ

R. Lampkin, (Contemporary Books)

This is an inexpensive book of 47 crosswords. 24 are Japanese to English and the remainder are English to Japanese. If you already have some vocabulary they are are a fun to revise and figure out new words by trying to fill in the blanks.

If you haven’t managed to master kana a romaji version is also available. One note though the book uses American spelling so it’s color not colour. etc.

by AOTS

This is the best of the books teaching you how to read and write kana. This one, with the aid of a CD, has you remember the sounds to go with the characters. Then you learn to write the characters by following a stroke order and tracing specimen characters. There are also examples of common mistakes to avoid. And later on there are exercises to identify characters that are easily mixed up. Another useful exercise is taking dictation of words from the CD. In Japanese if you can hear the word correctly you can “spell” it.

I found that the best way to learn kana was a row at a time. I did the exercises then wrote them out repeatedly saying the sound out loud. Each succeeding day I added the next row, when it became easier I added 2 rows. In spare moments I’d try to write out the syllabet from memory. Katakana was quicker to learn than hiragana. But in all I think it’d take at least a month to learn both systems. Once you’ve learnt it use it in preference to romaji when writing any Japanese.

I haven’t seen this book anywhere other than the Japan Centre in London Piccadilly.

There are sample pages available on this site