Specs
This book is difficult to grade. In actuality, it is a graded reader starting from a very low level, but it continues all the way through to incredibly advanced material, such as high level 40+ books. We specified lvl 20 as the level, because those users would be able to make use of a significant portion of the book, but it does start below that level (hiragana/katakana).
As a result of this complication, we've marked this book as a textbook so users are not prompted to grade the difficulty (textbooks are excluded from grading).
Reviews
(3/5)August 2, 2023
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How they had to learn Japanese in the 1960s...
I like this book, but more as part of my "how they used to have to study Japanese" book collection than as a serious tool for the modern learner (it was first published in 1962). This is a set of 75 graded texts that go all the way from "hiragana a-no" to "An outline of the liberalisation plans in foreign trade and exchange", so there is a pretty steep difficulty gradient through the book. I mostly kept the book on my shelf and periodically retried it to see if I'd made enough progress in my ability to tackle another lesson or two.
Each lesson has vocabulary and also grammar notes for particularly confusing places. As you might expect for a 1960s text, there is liberal use of romaji in the explanations and vocabulary sections. The choices of text are often pretty dry -- classic literature or non fiction essays like "Genre painting of the 16th and 17th centuries".
The book includes 9 lessons which use the pre-war kana orthography (歴史的仮名遣い) -- in the 1960s there were still enough old books kicking around that Miller says "the student should be able to recognize and interpret [it], though there is no longer any need for him to learn to write it". This is much less true today, but if you do have some reason to want or need to learn the old kana spellings, these 9 lessons are one of the only parts of the book which haven't been in practice massively superseded by more modern readers. These nine lessons are extracts from classic literature -- Mishima Yukio's The Sound of Waves, Kawabata Yasunari's Snow Country, and Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's The Makioka Sisters.