Have anybody read these books?

Has anybody read these books:''Making out in Japanese'' & More making out in Japanese''?

Are they good for dating? As as course materials, are there any redundancies at all??

Please advise.

I've browsed through those two books at a bookstore - they are good for laughing :) Whether it's good for dating would depend on how much sense of humor your date has.

Those are phrase books, not grammar books, so I would not recommend them really as course materials (is this what you mean?).

HiAK,

How are you?

I have been using the book called ''Japanese for Busy People''. And I would like to find another book which is useful when I talk to my Japanese boyfriend. Any recommendations??

Please fill me in.

I can't imagine "Making Out in Japanese" bring used as course materials- you know what "making out" means, right?

As for using the language in the books, it is extremely slangy, which sounds odd coming from a non-Japanese unless they are very fluent, so you would probably find the people you talked to were very amused by it.

It is also pretty limited in scope, i.e. it only contains phrases for using when "making out"- unless you are already quite fluent at Japanese, you are better off with a general text to get an idea of grammar structures first.

Hi Shu,

I have some other course materials already. Perhaps these kind of books could be used as supplementary materials.

"Making out" means kind of relationship. Is that right?

Chan,

I've got both books, which are now very yellowed, sitting on my bookshelf. I would thoroughly recommend them as useful guides to everyday (i.e. real) colloquial Japanese to be used alongside a proper textbook. Despite the titles, they are not only about phrases for dating, but they are good for learning differences between male and female speech.

Thanks Dave, your comments sounds good to me!

Umm, I somehow recalled the books as quite limited in scope and substance, but maybe I'm wrong (having read Dave in Saitama's comments) - I've browsed through the books again on Amazon.com's "look inside" function, and at least the pages shown are decent. Sorry! But now I know why some people start using "atashi" (female first person pronoun).... lol. Still, yes, those phrase books (particularly those on the colloquial side) should be really supplemental material.

I hope you've gotten to the chapters in "Japanese for Busy People, Book II" where they show the informal speech versus the polite speech (used throughout Book I), so that you will find a not-too-formal way to talk with your boyfriend :)

Thanks AK, I hesitate to use "Japanese for Busy People II" since they are not romanji. But I' ll see.

You should really go ahead and learn Hiragana then.

Hiragana is not that difficult, if you really applied yourself you can get most of them really fast. Helps out if you want to learn Japanese anyway.

"Making out" means a kind of relationship? Just curious how old you might be.

I browsed though these books at the book store before, they were good for laughs, I saw a few Japanese people stop by picked it up and they seem to have a good laugh at it too, so good if you want to learn some interesting language phrases but not for learning how to communicate and speak in Japanese.

Good idea! I am a bit mature already. Thanks.