Reddit Reddit reviews Read Real Japanese Essays: Contemporary Writings by Popular Authors

We found 9 Reddit comments about Read Real Japanese Essays: Contemporary Writings by Popular Authors. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

Reference
Books
Foreign Dictionaries & Thesauruses
Foreign Language Reference
Read Real Japanese Essays: Contemporary Writings by Popular Authors
Kodansha
Check price on Amazon

9 Reddit comments about Read Real Japanese Essays: Contemporary Writings by Popular Authors:

u/SuikaCider · 157 pointsr/languagelearning

Post Genki II Stuff

  1. Watch Shirokuma Cafe on this website. Animelon is beautiful because all of its anime have subtitles available in English, romaji (latinized Japanese), hiragana, and normal Japanese -- start with English & normal Japanese for a few episodes to get used to how people talk, then turn off English and begin ganbatte'ing (doing your best). This anime is about a panda bear working in a cafe owned by a polar bear where they make food for guests and go on various adventures. It's great because the vocabulary is almost entirely every day (minus the polar bear's obnoxious puns), and it also has a variety of accents, so you'll begin getting used to Japanese sounds. If you like dry humor, you'll even enjoy the anime. I personally laughed so hard that I cried, twice.

  2. Begin going through the N3 grammar videos from Nihongo no Mori, also feel free to check out their Dangerous Japanese (slang), and move on to N2 and N1 grammar as you feel ready. Their videos are great because they all have subtitles, they circumlocate to simpler Japanese to explain difficult words in the example sentenecs (explaining Japanese with simpler Japanese), and they have fun. These videos were personally the first "all Japanese" content that I consumed, and after I had been watching for a week or so I began with Shirokuma Cafe.

  3. Buy Read Real Japanese Contemporary Fiction and Essays. These books are great: they present 7 short stories or essays that are 100% unaltered (except for adding readings to Kanji that appear for the first time in a given article), as a native speaker would see them. That's on the right page. The left page has a running gloss into English -- it's just enough to help you understand the meanings of parts you didn't quite understand, but not so much that you'd understand what was going on by only reading it. The real gem is that the 2nd half of the book is a running grammatical dictionary, as in the author devotes like ~130 pages to explaining all of the grammar that was contained in every single article that is more advanced than ~Late Genki II stuff. These are the holy grail of Japanese learning content for me; they're literally training wheels for reading read Japanese stuff. I read each one with a notebook: I went one sentence at a time, reading every grammar explanation, and writing down any grammar that I didn't know. Sounds time consuming, but I still went through a story in 1-2 days (2-4 hours? per story on average). After finishing the book I waited 2 weeks then read it again, highlighting the sentences that I still struggled with, double checking that grammar. Then I read it again a month later, not checking the grammar, and added any sentences i still didn't explain into Anki as Clozed Deletion Card.

  4. I say again -- Read Real Japanese is training wheels to Reading Real Japanese. Written Japanese is quite different than Spoken Japanese, and this book really helps to iron out everything that might have not quite gotten through your system yet. When you finish the two books, begin looking for native books you can read on an e-reader/the computer. Just pick whatever you're interested in that has been written in the last 20 years. It's important to do it on a Kindle/computer because this enables you to highlight words to search them in the dictionary, rather than having to draw the characters out to search by hand in your phone dictionary. The Kindle is a pair of stilts that makes reading tolerable at a fluency level where it would normally be unbearable -- and I think this goes for any language, but particularly for languages like Japanese/Chinese where the primary writing system isn't necessarily phonetic.

  5. In addition to reading, listen to lots of stuff. Find something that is interesting to you -- ie, something you find entertaining enough that you're willing to slodge through the beginning phase where it's not-pleasantly-difficult -- and stick to it. I personally liked/like Taigu Channel; a Buddhist monk here in Japan takes in letters from people struggling with life problems (what is happiness? what is freedom? How can I show the people around me that I appreciate them?) and then he answers them from a Buddhist perspective. Objectively speaking I think it's super for a first listening resource because he speaks clearly, somewhat slowly, a lot of the videos have subtitles, and he's talking about everyday-life problems meaning that the vocabulary is limited to practical things. If you're interested in Buddhism, I personally find the videos to be really enlightening. This is the ultimate goal of language learning, in my opinion -- to find a way to make your target language a medium; a gateway to knowledge or entertainment that you want, which just happens to be only in your target language... meaning that just by enjoying yourself and consuming content you want to consume, you naturally improve your language.

  6. Check out Flowverlapping, find some music you like, and work at it to help you (a) learn the sounds of Japanese, (b) work into a more natural sounding rhythm/intonation, and (c) to (hopefully) get something of a feel for Japanese's two pitch accents. This is basically not necessary for being understood, but will definitely help you to sound more pleasant on the ears, and figured I might as well leave the link just in case you happen to be interested in pronunciation. Since it can be difficult to break into music in a new language, I'll also leave a few songs that I like in different genres. Yonedzu Kenshi-AiNekutai (indie), Mucc-Heide (visual kei), King Giddra-Bullet of Truth(uhh, hard? rap), Kohh-Don't Care If I'm Broke(uhh, soft? rap), Perfume-Flash(J-pop),Urashima Tarou - Voice of the Sea(makes me think of Japan) Kobasolo - Far, Far away (a playlist of soft music I gathered). Music is important to me, personally -- so if you enjoy music, I hope there's something you like here somewhere.
u/NoRefund17 · 5 pointsr/LearnJapanese

https://www.amazon.com/Living-Japanese-Diversity-Lifestyles-Conversations/dp/030010958X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1469162331&sr=8-2&keywords=living+japanese

I think that is an amazing recourse. Natural, REAL conversations with people of all ages and topics. Its really good for getting exposure you can learn from easily to native speaking that isn't "dramatized" or too over the top like most anime and Japanese TV acting in general.


LingQ.com (is also a great recourse. and its free if you don't use the in site word marking tools)

https://www.amazon.com/Read-Real-Japanese-Fiction-Contemporary/dp/1568365292/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1469162459&sr=8-1&keywords=read+real+japanese

https://www.amazon.com/Read-Real-Japanese-Essays-Contemporary/dp/1568364148/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1469162459&sr=8-2&keywords=read+real+japanese

https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-into-Japanese-Literature-Classics/dp/1568364156/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1469162459&sr=8-3&keywords=read+real+japanese

the last three are good for written japanese, which is more polished and different than real "spoken" japanese (like any language). But they all 3 come with audio, grammar and vocab explanations and are an amazing recourse IMO.

u/askja · 4 pointsr/LearnJapanese

I wouldn't go for something like Murakami to practice translation because, as atgm points out, the translators wouldn't be translating 1:1.

Why not try one of the "Breaking into Japanese Literature" or "Read Real Japanese" books (any kind of reader really)? They usually come with a direct translation and a more artistic translation. The texts are shorter which should keep your interest up for longer but there's still enough stories for you to have enough to do.

There's plenty of others but a few examples would be:

Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text

Exploring Japanese Literature: Read Mishima, Tanizaki, and Kawabata in the Original

Read Real Japanese Fiction: Short Stories by Contemporary Writers

Read Real Japanese: All You Need to Enjoy Eight Contemporary Writers

Read Real Japanese Essays: Contemporary Writings by Popular Authors

I think all of those had the "look inside" enabled so you can decide which style of translation you prefer.

If translation is something that interests you, I recommend heading over to /r/translationstudies to get a few tips on good books on translation studies.

u/soku1 · 3 pointsr/LearnJapanese

There's three great books out there that I can think of off the top of my head.

[Read Real Japanese: Short Stories by Contemporary Writers] (http://www.amazon.co.jp/Read-Real-Japanese-Fiction-Contemporary/dp/1568365292)

and

[Read Real Japanese Essays: Contemporary Writings by Popular Authors] (http://www.amazon.co.jp/Read-Real-Japanese-Essays-Contemporary/dp/1568364148)

and

[Breaking into Japanese literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text] (http://www.amazon.co.jp/Breaking-into-Japanese-Literature-Classics/dp/1568364156)

PS: if you are "fresh out of Genki 2" level, I'd say these books may be fairly advanced for you, but to each their own. Some people don't mind. There are english translations after all.

u/riruponpu · 2 pointsr/japanlife

Is it the read real japanese series? I remember someone mentioning it to me a while back but i forgot about it until your post.

WRT grammar i don't know what it is but I always end up overcomplicating what should be a basic sentence. Especially when i'm not actively trying to think of the most efficient way to say something. It's something I do in English too but since I'm not a native Japanese speaker it just comes off as super awkward, rather than me being relatively long-winded.

I do need to brush up on certain rules that I understand when heard, but tend to fuck up when i'm trying to use though...(causative form comes to mind)

also ty

u/MasterHiggGround · 2 pointsr/LearnJapanese

While I personally do not know any, as I am a beginner (for like, 4 or six years due to my lack of studying :D )
u/overactive-bladder had shown me some.



u/overactive-bladder · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

there are many graded readers out there with exactly what you're describing though.

u/aardvarkinspace · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

if you are still at the level where you feel like you need English translation, maybe try something like satori reader or the Read Real Japanese books. They will have information on the grammar and explain nuances to you which is a lot better for learning than trying to compare to the English translation. As other have said translation isn't literal, and I don't think it will help you know if you got it right in all cases. That said I do sometimes read stories which I have read in English as at least I know the basic premise and it helps me figure things out in a broader context.

u/Pennwisedom · 1 pointr/LearnJapanese

Anyone ever read the "Read Real Japanese" books?

http://www.amazon.com/Read-Real-Japanese-Fiction-Contemporary/dp/1568365292 Fiction

http://www.amazon.com/Read-Real-Japanese-Essays-Contemporary/dp/1568364148 Essays

I was looking at them in the bookstore, and they seem to have interesting authors. But I couldn't tell if it is really any help in learning, or if it is something you need to be pretty advanced to get anything out of.