Are those Kanji de Manga books any good

[Royce]

You know those little book that are suppose to teach you Japanese,are they really helpful. I not planning to learn the language right now but I would like to know if someone that is fluent in Japanese can say if those books are really good or not.

This is the link so you would know what i'm talking about.

http://www.howtodrawmanga.com/bookstore/shop.php

[Arxane]

I saw these books sitting on the shelf of my local Borders, and I wondered whether they were good or not. I leafed through one to see what it offered. From what I could tell, these books focus heavily on teaching you how to write Japanese characters. This isn't a bad thing, but it's usually something that a good Japanese class will teach you anyway.

From what I saw in the books, they teach how to draw kanji and use them in sentences without really actually teaching Japanese grammar, which I feel is important when you're learning Japanese characters, especially kanji. Learning the definitions of kanji is great and all, but if you're not going to learn how to use them in proper sentences, then it's not a complete effort. Japanese is a language filled with certain rules and structures based on respect and politeness and heirarchy, and if you use the wrong tense or phrase you can be seen as being rude. For example, in Japanese there is a specfic way to express desire (i.e., "I want to drink coffee"; "Yamada-san wants to go to Japan"), but it is considered impolite to ask someone if they want to do something using this method. My Japanese teacher has made sure to teach us formal speech initially, not casual speech, so we're more comfortable with formal speech. I'm not sure what kind of speech these books teach, but I hope they're not casual speech.

As for kanji themselves, they have their own nuances. For example, the verb くる　(kuru; to come) is written in kanji as 来る. These books might mention the kanji 来's onyomi (Chinese reading) ライ (rai) and kunyomi (Japanese reading) く (ku), but you have to study Japanese grammar to know that くる is an irregular verb and that 来 can be read as く (ku),　き (ki), or こ (ko) depending on the verb tense. Also, when learning the kanji for verbs, it's important to learn about the hiragana inflectional endings (okurigana) that change depending on the verb tense, and that some verbs like 食べる, or たべる (taberu; to eat), have okurigana that don't change for whatever reason.

When learning kanji, it's also important to know when to generally use the onyomi or kunyomi of a kanji and where those accursed exceptions are. The onyomi for 今　(now) is コン (kon), but when combined with 年 (nen, toshi; year) to form 今年 (this year), it's pronounced ことし (kotoshi). And the onyomi for 手 (hand) is シュ　(shu), but that doesn't stop its pronounciation from changing when combined with 上　(ue, jou; on, above) to form 上手　(good at), which is pronounced じょうず (jouzu).

And let's not get started on Japanese numbers, whose pronounciations change depending on what's being counted. 一日 can be read as いちにち　(ichinichi; one day) or ついたち　(tsuitachi; first day of the month).

In my opinion, these books aren't meant for serious study and should only be used in conjunction with either a Japanese class or a really good teach-yourself book. The best thing I can see about these books is that they might help people who are having a little trouble with certain kanji. Other than that, there's not much I can say about them.

Disclaimer - I've only taken one year of Japanese, so my knowledge on the subject is very limited. I'm also apologize if my using Japanese characters above frequently is overkill; I'm just so used to writing in kana and I never learned to write in romaji (which is a good thing, mind you).