How I studied Japanese in 1976

I started studying Japanese about fifty years ago. Whew! One of my techniques was transcribing Japanese words and sentences.

I still remember the “Miller” book in the top margin. It was A Japanese Reader: Graded Lessons for Mastering the Written Language, by Roy Andrew Miller. This book had been published just a few years earlier, in 1972. What a treasure trove! The sample above was from Chapter 14, “Okurigana”. Here’s that part, which I hope qualifies as fair use:

“Sakade number” refers to A Guide To Reading & Writing Japanese: The 1,850 Basic Characters and The Kana Syllabaries by Florence Sakade, with which I spent an unreasonable amount of time. “Martin” refers to A Reference Manual of Japanese by Samuel E. Martin, the most ridiculously complete exposition of Japanese grammar in existence, which I probably read every page of. My Japanese is dokugaku (独学, “self-taught”).

Miller’s reader extends from very basic topics like the above to excerpts from Japanese literature, including my old favorite Snow Country:

It then proceeds to present readings in religion, economics and finance, and politics. We owe Professor Miller an immense debt of gratitude for his invaluable contributions to our language learning efforts.

Roy Andrew Miller was an eminent scholar of linguistics and teacher of Japanese, who taught at ICU, Yale, and then the University of Washington. I highly recommend his Japan’s Modern Myth, the “myth” in question being essentially that Japanese are utterly unique and that this uniqueness extends to their language: non-Japanese cannot ever really learn Japanese. This book had an incontrovertible impact on my deep interest in the Japanese language.

I’m not necessarily recommending transcription as a primary mode of Japanese study in 2025, but there are worse approaches. More of my transcriptions just for fun:

Bob's Japanese Study Around 1975

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