Japanese in Mangaland: Learning The Basics,   ISBN:9784889961157

Customer Rating: 

Pros:
The book itself is a gem. I have just about finished reading the entire book over the span of the last couple months (I have the 2nd and 3rd volume waiting for me on the bookshelf). The biggest strength of this book is the grammar lessons in addition to the plethora of information organized into tabular forms. I will state that you need to take your time with the material. Do not attempt to blaze through it if you don't understand the grammar, as future lessons make the assumption your understanding of past material is sound. Another strength of the book is that it doesn't attempt to teach you everything in polite form, but instructs everything from its short form and only ventures off into polite form when the grammatical construct requires such.

Cons:
Now for a warning to potential buyers. Do not expect this to be a book you crack open to "have fun reading manga". For whatever reason, the authors decided to use "single panel" manga for their examples. More often than not, you're left without enough context for the scene to truly grasp why a character is saying what they're saying. Other times the panel text is simply too redundant, without incorporating more of a story behind the words (again - context). Another glaring issue is the consistent quantity of typos (I believe I have the 3rd and final edition of this book and there are still plenty).

Conclusion:
This book is loaded with lots of useful grammar forms, mixed with some heavy vocab-based chapters in between, paired with some lacking manga panel examples and typos. If you can handle the fact that you'll have to get your manga fix elsewhere (which I highly recommend) and ignore the typos here and there, the book is actually one of the better ones on the market.

Customer Rating: 

this book was not useful to me because i don't think i need to know the phrase 'where are my ninja stars'.. however i made tons of friends at japanese camp with this book.. though i suppose maybe someone who actually liked manga might find the book more useful..

not worth the money in my opinion.. i donated it to my local library..

Customer Rating: 

Manga's now worldwide popularity makes a Japanese language course like this one inevitable. Kids and adults (come on, admit it) drool over those mass paperback sized comic books that open from the back. More than anything, this now global art form has brought Japanese culture to the world stage. And, along with it, a heightened interest in Japanese language. There's more to manga than exploding robots and women's underwear (though a quick glance at the bookstore shelves will refute this). It provides one of the most accessible peepholes into Japan and its beautiful and complex language.

"Japanese in Mangaland" provides a great introduction to Japanese, though it doesn't provide a great introduction to manga. No classic manga such as "Tetsuwan Atomu," "Akira," "Urusei Yatsura," or even "Dragon Ball" graces the book's pages. All the interior art was created for this series. But manga isn't really the point here. Japanese is. Here the book mostly excels, but of course it's not perfect. The lessons remain clear throughout. Easy. Fun to read. Short. Concise. No pedagogical sprawl mars the chapters. The book provides almost everything: a history of Japanese, complete syllabaries of Hiragana and Katakana, and enough grammar for anyone to read or write simple Japanese. Even Kanji appears (though maybe a little too early). And since the course follows manga usage, as opposed to a formal college course, informal language gets introduced early on. This presents an entirely different dimension. Most courses and books hold off on the informal (though this is likely changing), but its ubiquity in everyday Japanese (not to mention the internet) makes this difficult to understand. No problem with that here. There's even a handy "Swearwords and Insults" chapter so you can start making friends right away.

Now for some of the drawbacks. Since the book throws Kanji in almost from the start, some absolute newcomers might have trouble keeping up. Those with some background in Kanji concepts will breeze on through. But some of the manga examples, even some in Chapter One, use complicated Kanji patterns that may make some readers think they've missed something. Fear not. Forge on. So some of these examples remain more helpful than others. Also, the exercises provided at the end of each chapter don't carry much oomph. They won't tax brains too much. People who really want to learn Japanese in pen and mouth will need supplementary workbooks, websites, or (best yet) cute Japanese significant others for full mastery. Regardless, this book provides a great framework for learning one of the world's most complex languages (it does have at least 4 alphabets). Just don't rely on it alone.

This book also teaches basic vocabulary, but basic verb conjugation, "i" and "na" adjectives (hint: some have tense), time telling, particles, family trees, adverbs, those bizarrely voluminous counters, and onomatopoeia ("pyong-pyong!"). Seeing that it includes only 160 Kanji, this book alone will not prepare anyone for reading actual Japanese manga. It will get you well along that path, however. The insanely dedicated should continue on with this series' equally excellent volumes 2 and 3. And don't forget the workbook (as of this writing, only 1 accompanying workbook has appeared). This will make up for the intellectually dainty exercises in this book. Ultimately, the book's pros outweigh its cons. Anyone looking for a good start or an excellent refresh should look here.

Customer Rating: 

The idea and concept behind this book is great, it would be a fun way to learn Japanese in this way. But as it is, the book is badly put together.

To start of with the positive aspects of this book:
> the book is fun to work with
> each chapter is very short and can be completed in just 30 minutes
> the grammar is explained with clarity
> it includes words and phrases that most Japanese textbooks would ignore

An added benefit of using this book has to do with fact that it is part a whole series of books that take you from beginner's level to advanced.
This is an important factor to consider if you plan to learn Japanese.

But despite having these positive things going for it, the book has significant problems that you need to consider.

First of all, for each chapter there is only one page of excercises to do, and these are usually too simplistic to give you any significant training. They exist only to check that you have grasped the basic concept of what the chapter presented.
Therefore you will (!) need to buy the workbook that accompanies this book,Japanese in MangaLand: Workbook 1, if you want to get any sort of training in grammar, vocabulary and reading.

But, only the first book in the whole series actually have a workbook to accompany it, the other books in the Mangland series don't have any !
So the question is, what do you do for training once you complete this book and wish to continue with the others in the series ?

A second significant problem with this particular book, has to do with the script-reading passages.
To begin with, they are far too few to give you a significant reading experience, and they consist mainly of one-liners.
But worst of all, they contain Kanji characters that the learner has not yet come across in the previous and current chapter(s).
So you end up reading the romanized script anyway !

Finally, all Kanji characters are listed in the end of the book where it is up to the learner to memorize them, as they are not introduced gradually in each chapter. The chapters themselves only contain word-lists, not Kanji lists.
Also, to train in these characters you need the extra workbook.
Again, the other books in the series don't have workbooks, so you don't get any training in how to read the Kanji.
There is therefore no structured way in learning the Kanji with this and the other books !

If you compare this book, and its related series, to that of Japanese For Busy People (JfBP), then it comes across as amateurish and incompetent.
Each book in the JfBP-series has its own workbook, and the kanji are taught gradually in each chapter. That is professionalism.
Mangland 1 and it's whole series, at the current time, seem more like an undergrads attempt to teach - great conceptualization but poor realization !

I would only recommend this book as a fun complement to more professional textbooks such as JfBP or Genki.
See it as a fun side-dish to an otherwise boring meal.
[I use this phrase to emphasize my point, not to imply that learning Japanese is boring nor that the above books are boring]

Customer Rating: 

Right now, I'm learning Japanese through manga. The problem for this review is that I'm doing it with another product- Japanese the Manga Way: An Illustrated Guide to Grammar and Structure. Japanese in Mangaland is a decent book, but it's by no means the best, and it's easily lost in a sea of better material.

The first and biggest strike against Japanese in Mangaland, is that it doesn't include real manga- all the "manga" included was drawn for the book. This pretty much violates the entire concept. Compare Japanese in Mangaland side-by-side with Japanese the Manga Way, which uses authentic material, and you'll see that the art used in Mangaland isn't really even close to authentic manga a majority of the time. Japanese in Mangaland mostly looks like western stereotypes of what manga is supposed to look like, and this is largely drawn from the artistic style of popular anime. You'll see lots of big eyes, Sailor Moon style. You won't see any of the extremely simple and often very cheaply printed styles of, for example, Shin-Chan.

Aside from violating the whole concept of learning through manga, Japanese in Mangaland isn't a bad book at its core. The best part of the book is that it has plenty of real exercises and practice lessons, which is the one thing that Japanese the Manga Way sorely lacks. Japanese in Mangaland also has multiple volumes and plenty of workbooks, meaning it's overall a more intensive program than Japanese the Manga Way, which is one standalone book with no exercises.

However, I really can't suggest Japanese in Mangaland even for its workbooks and exercises. If you've got the motivation to get that far into learning a language, it's time to join in on a real Japanese learning course, or to just pick up some real manga and look up the parts you don't recognize in reference books. A book like Japanese the Manga Way is really meant to be a stepping stone, encouraging you to go buy some real Japanese reading material and immerse yourself. That's a much better way to learn the language. Japanese in Mangaland is just your average workbook disguised by false manga-styled drawings.

So I can't recommend purchasing Japanese in Mangaland. If you really want to read manga, pick up Japanese the Manga Way and start reading real manga now. If you're more interested in just reading the language for its own sake, lessons on topics like swearing and onomatopoeia (words that describe sounds, like "zzz.." for sleeping or "vrooom" for driving) are best left to later courses while you work on your basics. I'd only recommend Japanese in Mangaland to someone who really can't help falling asleep reading a coursebook unless it has cute pictures in it, or maybe if you're really desperate for a few pages on topics like swearing and onomatopoeia- in which case you might want to pick it up from the library instead.