 | Mangajin's Basic Japanese Through Comics (v. 1)
Buy new: $16.47 / Used from: $2.04 A very useful book, which can guide you through the language very effectively. Covers the basics as well as many advanced topics in a fun and helpful way.
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 | Mangajin's Basic Japanese Through Comics (Part 2)
Buy new: $14.95 / Used from: $6.44 The second volume of the Mangajin series. The same comments apply.
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 | Remembering the Kana: A Guide to Reading and Writing the Japanese Syllabaries in 3 Hours Each (Manoa) (Japanese Edition) (part 1) by James W. Heisig
Buy new: $14.45 / Used from: $11.89 The very best book I know on learning hiragana and katakana, the two Japanese syllabary writing systems. Just knowing these will help you navigate a good deal of Japanese.
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 | The Complete Idiot's Guide to Conversational Japanese with CD-ROM by Naoya Fujita
Buy new: $17.12 / Used from: $1.06 A very well-thought-out and well-presented books on the basics of conversational Japanese; don't let the title put you off. This gets into some non-basic topics, as well.
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 | Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication: A Self-Study Course and Reference by Taeko Kamiya
Buy new: $14.96 / Used from: $12.95 One of the hardest things about Japanese is how different from English the sentence structures are. This is a basic-to-intermediate book which is a terrific guide to a variety of sentence structures. The book is also designed in such a way that beginners can learn quite a bit from it, both in terms of grammar as well as vocabulary.
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 | The Handbook of Japanese Verbs by Taeko Kamiya
Buy new: $12.92 / Used from: $10.91 Another extremely useful verb. Japanese doesn't have "conjugation", per se, but what it does have is about as complicated. This book is a good guide.
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 | The Handbook of Japanese Adjectives and Adverbs (Kodansha's Children's Classics) by Taeko Kamiya
Buy new: $16.50 / Used from: $14.00 This book performs the same function for adjectives and adverbs (which turn out to be rather more complicated in Japanese than in English).
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 | Kodanshas Essential Kanji Dictionary (Japanese for Busy People) by Kodansha International
Buy new: $26.37 / Used from: $17.14 This is a good dictionary which covers all of the close-to-2000 "jouyo" (standard) kanji. You're going to need this at some point.
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 | Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters by James W. Heisig
Buy new: $26.48 / Used from: $23.00 This is, in my opinion, the very best book to use to learn the kanji. It uses a well-thought-out mnemonic system. The only disadvantage is that you won't learn them in any sort of "most frequently used" order, but I found that the relative ease with which one could learn using this book made up for that.
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 | Making Out in Japanese Phrase Book, Revised Edition (Japanese Edition) by Todd Geers
Buy new: $7.95 / Used from: $1.19 It's worth it to learn some Japanese slang, if only for fun. This is a great book for that.
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 | More Making Out in Japanese, Revised Edition (Japanese Edition) by Todd Geers
Buy new: $7.95 / Used from: $1.24 The second volume in the series.
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 | Breaking into Japanese Literature: Seven Modern Classics in Parallel Text by Giles Murray
Buy new: $13.57 / Used from: $9.18 A very good book to use to begin reading Japanese. All the kanji used are defined in footnotes on the same page on which they appear, as well as having an English translation of the Japanese text (which consists of a number of modern short stories) on the facing page.
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