Editor Jennifer Suggests: Japanese in Mangaland

As a homeschooling parent, I've had to teach all kinds of subjects. I have my strengths (history and literature) and my weaknesses (quadratic equations), but nothing has thrashed my butt quite like Japanese.

It's one thing to try to teach a subject you know. It's quite another thing to teach a subject you don't know the first thing about. Last year I got exactly nowhere trying to help my son learn Japanese. Luckily, I just stumbled across a book that I think will help.

It's Japanese in Mangaland, by Mark Bernabe. Japanese in Mangaland doesn't purport to teach you to speak Japanese like a pro; its aim is to teach you enough about the language to be able to understand Manga comic books armed with a Japanese dictionary. It covers hiragana, katakana and kanji writing, and the thing that sold me on the book is that within a couple of pages I learned more about hiragana than I had from any of the other books I looked into.

Let's face it; there's no easy way to learn Japanese, but Japanese in Mangaland makes it fun and gives you an incentive to learn - so you can understand all those weird comics. I'm looking forward to learning more.