Book review & giveaway 2: Intermediate Japanese

As I mentioned last month, Tuttle Books sent me a couple books to review on my blog here.

And they also are kindly giving one free copy of each book to a random visitor to my blog.

Click here to read my review of the book about Japanese architecture (and to enter , by 2014 August 31st, for a chance to win a free copy of that book).

The book that I am reviewing here is titled “Intermediate Japanese by Michael L. Kluemper and Lisa Berkson.
(At the end of this post will be the details of the book giveaway.)

Are you studying Japanese? If so, this book and accompanying CD are an excellent tool!

All of the other Japanese study materials that I have were written by Japanese people, so I was at bit skeptical at first about this book because neither of the authors are native Japanese speakers.
But they both have studied Japanese for years and worked as translators and Japanese language teachers at high schools in America (that was a surprise to me too! Do high schools in America have Japanese language classes now?)…and their method of teaching the language is a bit differently than a Japanese teacher’s. I think that, as they learned Japanese as a second language too, they have an approach to teaching it that may be easier for non-Japanese to learn.

This book has a manga style story written in Japanese. New kanji is introduced using “furigana” the first time, but is written without it from then on.
It also has kanji study pages, vocabulary drills, and exercises to test the learner’s understanding.
It also has a CD of the new vocabulary words and the story dialogs. I copied the CD onto my phone and listen on the train during my work commute.

I have the “Intermediate Japanese” book. The book have little English and the CD has none. So it’s good for intermediate level learners…there are also beginner and advanced level books in this series.

As I said above, I like this book and think it’s a very good study tool.

If you’d like to purchase it, it’s available at this Amazon.com link.

Tuttle Books is giving (gave) one copy of this book to a random visitor of my blog.

Fill in this form by 2014 August 31st for a chance to win it:

***** Updated September 1st, 2014 *****

This special promo ended on 2014 August 31st. One random winner was selected and contacted directly by Tuttle Publishers (via email) with the details about the free book.

Thank you to all who entered, but only the winner was contacted.
*****