About Us
Noriko Ura and Roger Lake host JapaneseAudioLessons.com, which offers 30 hours of free Japanese audio lessons.
In addition, we have written four books titled Learn to Read in Japanese, A Japanese Reader, Volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4. We have also compiled four Core Kanji catalogues describing the kanji introduced in the four Readers. The books teach a total of 2,088 kanji and provide thousands of sentences for reading practice, along with same-page romaji equivalents and translations.
We have also assembled a glossary titled Learn to Read in Japanese, a Glossary, listing virtually all of the Japanese terms found in the four Readers, with definitions, memory aids and synonyms.
All of these books are available in PDF and print versions. The PDF versions are recommended only for students who plan to use them on a laptop or desktop computer because our tests suggest that searches conducted in these large documents are too slow on other devices. Also, we believe that the most efficient way to study these documents is by placing them in open windows on a screen. When the documents are arranged in this way, students can easily turn from, say, Japanese text in one window to English text and romaji in another window, to information about kanji in a third window, to similar or related kanji in a fourth window (for comparison purposes), and to glossary terms in a fifth window, before returning to the Japanese text in the first window.
Please note that the material in the Core Kanji catalogues is cumulative. In other words, the Core Kanji catalogue for Vol. 2 teaches all of the kanji found in Readers 1 and 2. Likewise, the Core Kanji catalogue for Vol. 3 teaches all of the kanji found in Readers 1 , 2, and 3. Finally, the complete Core Kanji catalogue (titled Core Kanji) teaches all of the kanji found in Volumes 1, 2, 3 and 4. If you have purchased an earlier edition of a PDF Core Kanji catalogue and then decide to purchase a later edition, please write to us before your second purchase, and we will send you a discount code for the later edition, so that you don't pay more than necessary. If you think that you will need all four editions, please purchase only the complete Core Kanji catalogue for Vol. 4, in addition to at least one of the Japanese readers.
For suggestions about how to use these PDF files for Japanese reading practice, please visit Suggestions for Efficient Reading Practice.