Category: japanese

reviews of books, resources, etc for studying Japanese

賢くなるクロスワード: 小学初級１〜３年 – is it any good?

Learning through puzzles. ‘You like doing puzzles in English, so why not Japanese?’ (these were my initial thoughts). I’m not sure it really worked out that way…

Some good crosswords:

  • 反対の意味の言葉
  • 似た意味の言葉
  • 漢字の書き
  • 漢字の読み

Crosswords that weren’t so useful:

  • 動物
  • 植物
  • 秋の言葉
  • 花の名前

Ultimately, this book was never aimed at me. It’s for children in primary school years 1-3. Whilst I might not be very interested in learning what different insects are called in Japanese, children in Japan certainly are and would have no trouble naming them. As I don’t know many insects (in Japanese or English), I would need ...

初級から中級への日本語ドリル・語彙 / Nihongo Drills for Intermediate Learners・Vocabulary

I’ve had this book lurking around for a while. I originally got it when I was going through my, ‘I need to learn all the basics in Japanese’ phase. It does have phrases that I don’t know, so I am happy with it. Top tip, if you haven’t realised by now, you cannot just learn words in Japanese and string them together, you have to learn phrases. I wish I had been told that when I first started learning.

How I use the book

I started off by going through the 覚えましょう section. I would either use their example sentence, ...

日本語能力試験直前対策N2　文字・語彙・文法

I appreciate this post isn’t really going to appeal to that many people but I’ve completed the book and I think it is really good for JLPT prep.

I have taken N2 and passed (just!) already and I did use this book whilst I was studying for it. I found it very hard at the time. A lot of the vocab and some of the grammar comes up in N1 stuff, so I hadn’t seen a lot of it before. I am trying to work my way through my mountain of study books at the moment, with my focus on ...

studying jlpt japanese

It’s a controversial topic – to JLPT or not, but like it or lump it, it can be quite useful when it comes to job hunting. Of course, it’s a double edged sword because the JLPT doesn’t test speaking, so you can have N1 but be terrible at speaking. People have their own assumptions about your abilities when it comes to your JLPT level but sometimes, their expectations can be a little unfair. Of course the JLPT doesn’t test writing either, which can be considered quite a useful skill.

Anyway, I wanted to compile a list of resources that have ...