Kanji De Manga Volume 6: The Comic Book That Teaches You How To Read And Write Japanese! (v. 6)

These little books are a fun way to learn basic kanji. Each entry consists of a single page with one to four manga (or "comic strip") panels. The dialog is completely in kana (hirgana and katakana, which are phonetic Japanese characters) except for the featured kanji character, which usually appears a couple of times. There are English translations below, but no "romanji" (English characters). And, the translations are not word for word. So, unless you read kana fluently and already understand a little Japanese, these books won't be of much use to you. They do have a "Kana de Manga" book, which might be a better place to start, although I have not read it myself.

This series is fantastic, I bought all six of them, if there are more I would buy them also. I realized too late that these are available in hardcopy, which I prefer over Kindle...Hence my complaint about this one (number 6), the format is significantly smaller, to the degree thant you can't read the small fonts, and if you try to zoom in kindle it loses resolution and becomes illegible. Again the page only covers about 60% of the device screen (in my case an iPad 2).The first five volumes do not have an issue, making them a beautiful useful product.

2/5 star = disliked, for the following reasons:1. kanji+furigana would have been better for the dialogue; instead it's completely hiragana with only the one kanji per page. this is poor for vocabulary learning. thus the reader must read the English at the bottom before attempting the strings of hiragana in the conversation, and try to guess where the words are divided amongst the hiragana.2. there were some English mistakes, suggesting a rushed job / carelessness3. the manga became rather sexist (about halfway through the series, i suppose), with male characters often being the source of ridicule, and female characters dominating the entire series.4. the Kindle resolution was poor. It was sometimes hard to read the furigana when the one kanji was used, e.g. whether it was 'bi' or 'pi' (びぴ), and zooming in only resulted in pixellation from the low resolution.5. These manga are not a good way to memorize kanji: a) I learn kanji through use in sentences, not through isolated word examples. b) There were not enough sentences demonstrating the kanji. c) The sentences being entirely hiragana except for the one kanji (rather than being kanji+furigana) resulted in the reader's attention being spent trying to decipher the sentences' meaning, rather than focusing on the kanji being practiced. Thus the reader winds up learning the dialogue of the comic rather than the kanji itself. "Oh, this is the comic where the two girls laugh at boy for hurting himself. What was the kanji's pronunciation, though?"6. The beginning point of the stroke order is not indicated in the diagrams, i.e. whether the stroke goes from bottom-left to top-right or from top-right to bottom-left. This is inexcusable from a "professional company", since I've gotten a *free* iPhone 4 application that does indicate this (kotoba! later renamed 'imiwa?' I think), and have seen other kanji books with arrows showing the stroke direction.I purchased these because they were recommended by the Consulate-General of my state, but do not recommend them. They're reasonable to borrow for free from a library, but you're better off spending your money on other resources.

This is not an easy book to follow. Actually its easy to follow - its hard to execute. You have to really want to learn Kanji and the chinese symbols.I have the whole series - it is accurate - I drew all the different symbols, but I am certainly not fluently able to read an write Japanese by any stretch - you have to want it!

These books are very useful; not only have they improved my kanji knowledge, but they have given me a real feeling for the flow of Japanese conversation.

It sounds a lot better than it is to be honest. This book really is not much worth at all. It is now living a miserable life on the shelf after one session (which really wasn't a great session at all). Although the manga made me expect to enjoy the book more, it has clearly just been used as a marketing tool, as the book has been poorly written in my opinion.