Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I basically agree with many of the other reviewers, but want to be a bit more specific. I attended the Cornell FALCON Program many years ago which focuses on spoken Japanese, but the biggest problem thereafter was developing a professional vocabulary for reading. Virtually all textbooks I knew until this one (except the Jorden book "Reading Japanese" which only covers about 550 kanji) rely on "brute force" memorization of largely unrelated kanji compounds which makes it very hard, even with a good dictionary, to learn to make sense of kanji compounds one has never seen before. I'm probably more determined to read Japanese than most, but brute force just isn't remotely time-efficient and it certainly is no fun.
This book (a very big pedagogical improvement over its predecessor by the same authors "Reading Technical Japanese") teaches you to recognize the building blocks, much as if you were expanding your English vocabulary by learning common Latin and Greek roots, prefixes, and suffixes for English words. And this approach helps build vocabulary well beyond the target areas of math, physics, chemistry, and biology also--I found I could read geography, economics, etc far more easily. Reading unfamilar material can still be hard work, but this book is FAR more efficient and I think gives a greater insight into the language.
It also teaches characteristics of the written scientific language one doesn't pick up in classes on the spoken language.
I literally went from not being able to read a Japanese elementary school math or science book easily (even though I probably knew close to a 1000 general kanji before this book, there were gaps in crucial places that made science very frustrating) to being able to read some college-level science text books and regular technical trade journal after finishing this book. And I worked through this book in about a month--that's what I mean by efficient.
There was nothing quite like it for business and finance (a great problem) and I wish they would tackle that field as well, or that someone would follow their approach.
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Even if you have had no Japanese-language training, you can learn how to translate technical manuals, research publications, and reference works. Basic Technical Japanese takes you step by step from an introduction to the Japanese writing system through a mastery of grammar and scientific vocabulary to reading actual texts in Japanese. You can use the book to study independently or in formal classes. This book places special emphasis on the kanji (characters) that occur most often in technical writing. There are special chapters on the language of mathematics and chemistry, and vocabulary building and reading exercises in physics, chemistry, biology, and biochemistry. With extensive character charts and vocabulary lists, Basic Technical Japanese is entirely self-contained; no dictionaries or other reference works are needed.
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