Reading Japanese Financial Newspapers

Rating:
Summary: This is the brute force approach
Review: I do not recommend this for learning kanji, but only for the word lists (like the sample financial statements at the end) and some of the grammatical points.
I've owned this book for ten years or so and never got even half-way thru the first section until I had worked my way thru another, far better book, "Business Kanji" published by Tuttle in 1999. I am now finally getting thru it, but still don't like it much.
Although this book is exhaustly thorough especially regarding grammatical patterns, it relies far to much on brute force memorization. Kanji are introduced and used in no apparent order and are not reinforced once learned.
It is perhaps the "best" for business of an outdated methodology which has been replaced by the far better approach of people like Eleanor Jorden ("Reading Japanese"--although that doesn't begin to go far enough to read a newspaper), Edward Daub et al. ("Basic Technical Japanese" which I have also reviewed very favorably here) and "Business Kanji" by Reiko Suzuki, et alia.

Rating:
Summary: Very very good book...
Review: I got this book hoping that it would give a boost to my newspaper reading ability... It did. Although I already knew almost all the Joyo kanji, I didn't know a laaarge number of the terms commonly used in newspapers... especially the financial terms. This book greatly helped in remedying that...

The most important thing you should know is that this book _isn't_ just about finance -- it's about almost everything in japanese newspapers, including sentence structure and common idioms... And at any rate, it's much nicer to skim by boring financial articles knowing that you could read them if you wanted to ...

If you are frustrated with newspapers, get this book. It won't do everything for you, but it'll do a lot... And it's easy to work through, especially if you're looking at papers all the time trying to read them... ;)

Rating:
Summary: Another classic Japanese language text...
Review: My advice is to use Jordan's Reading Japanese as a starting point, and eventually move on to Reading Japanese Financial Newspapers. I struggled with this text for quite some time, but eventually emerged literate enough to read Nikkei Shimbun pretty comfortably...