Reviews

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I Think There Really Is Something to Some of This Stuff

4 Mandarin, Books, Sports/Fitness

Since I am interested in health and fitness, reading about Traditional Chinese Medicine was one of the things I did to try to get a better sense of Chinese culture. This book did not in any way enhance my language…

Step by Step Korean Penmanship: Look at the Happy Student on the Cover!

4 Korean, Books, Multimedia

I bought Step by Step Korean Penmanship at Koryo Books in Koreatown, because I was experiencing a language emergency! Specifically, I had come to a dead end in both of the Korean textbooks I was using: I couldn’…

Master the Basics of Japanese with These Useful, Clear Explanations

4 Japanese, Books

Master the Basics: Japanese by Nobuo Akiyama and Carol Akiyama begins with a multi-page diagnostic test to see how much you know. Since I personally knew nothing when I opened the book, I was a bit thrown…

Kana de Manga: I Think This Is A Kids' Book, But I Didn't Mind

3 Japanese, Books, Kids

Japanese has a complicated writing system combining two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana), as well as thousands of Chinese characters called kanji. A syllabary is different from an alphabet in the sense that each syllabary symbol represents a syllable (such as …

Advanced Italian Grammar: Some Great Practice

4 Italian, Books

Practice Makes Perfect: Advanced Italian Grammar by Marcel Danesi is part of a series of compact, more focused books within the larger Practice Makes Perfect series from McGraw-Hill. Overall I like this one. Advanced Italian…

Elementary Korean? I Think I Needed a Teacher to Accompany This

3 Korean, Books, Multimedia

I was pretty quickly overwhelmed by Elementary Korean. It is a textbook, accompanied by a CD to help with pronunciation. It is in fact a heavy, nearly $70 textbook, and the accompanying Elementary Korean Workbook is…

Elementary Korean Workbook: I Enjoyed What Little I Did in This

3 Korean, Books, Multimedia

In my very brief encounter with this Elementary Korean Workbook, I liked it reasonably well. It comes with a CD and is a companion to the big orange Elementary Korean textbook also reviewed in…

McGraw-Hill's Italian Vocabulary: Quirky But Entertaining

4 Italian, Books, Vocabulary

McGraw-Hill offers Practice Makes Perfect vocabulary books for multiple languages. I have found them odd in ways, with silly sentences providing awkward transitions between groups of thematically linked words. But I like them nonetheless, and I…

Berlitz Polish Pocket Dictionary, with Pencil for Scale

Polish, Books, Dictionaries

For my Polish studies, I ended up using the Oxford Essential Polish Dictionary instead of this one from Berlitz, just because that one happens to be bigger (though still small) and holds more words. The Berlitz Polish…

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