Best Books for Learning Japanese

Best Books for Learning Japanese

I've spent a lot of money on books over the years... and not all of it was well spent -- although I did end up learning Japanese! On my blog I often get questions asking which books I recommend for certain areas of study, such as Japanese vocabulary, kanji, grammar, reading skill, or listening, for specific JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) levels, etc. So I though I'd summarize it on this page, for easy reference.

All the books I recommend there are ones that I own or have owned and have found useful. I've probably bought way more books than necessary over the years, but I find buying books for myself keeps me motivated to study, so it has probably been worth it in the end, even if some of those books weren't very good.

Just started learning?
So you wanna learn Japanese? That's great!
I was a Japanese padawan myself some 5 years ago - but now I am nearly fluent. It's been a long but very fun and rewarding journey, and I really recommend everyone to start learning Japanese. Anyway, let me point out some tips that I think might be useful for a beginning Japanese student:

Don't fall into the romaji trap! Japanese written using the Latin alphabet is called romaji. You can use romaji to learn the Japanese kana syllabaries hiragana and katakana. After that you should get rid of using romaji as soon as humanly possible. There are two reasons for that: One is that you need to become literate as soon as possible. Literacy is key to efficient learning of any language - and even more so Japanese, which literal form has some quirks (to say the least), that are reflected in the spoken language too! The other reason is that it'll make your spoken Japanese sound more natural. Maybe I'm just imagining, but I think I can tell when a foreigner has learned Japanese through romaji from the way he/she is speaking.

Make sure you have a good Japanese dictionary and kanji dictionary. They're indispensable for your learning progress. Your goal is to learn the whole Japanese language, right? So every time you see a word or kanji you don't know - look it up, write it down, and study it.