Reading Japanese

"Reading Japanese" is a pedagogical text - not a handbook or dictionary - prepared for the specific purpose of introducing adult foreigners, in particular English speakers, to the Japanese written language, to enable them to begin to learn to read. Since it is a pedagogical text, it presents information in an ordered fashion. Each increment of new material presupposes mastery of what has gone before, but only of what has gone before. Adult foreigners and native-Japanese children approach the study of Japanese reading with vastly different backgrounds and in vastly different settings. It is dangerous to assume that the same methodology will work for both groups, even though their goals are similar. In spite of the limitations of their Japanese facility, foreign students studying the Japanese written language want to learn to read, not to decode with constant dependence on dictionaries and vocabulary lists. And they want to become accustomed to working with Japanese writing that has not been specifically altered for foreign consumption, since their ultimate goal is to read native Japanese publications. This book, through its particular format and organization of the text, is aimed at achieving this stated goal as rapidly and efficiently as possible. [From the Introduction]