Postby ander8339 » July 30th, 2010 4:14 am
The book Reading Japanese by Eleanor Harz Jorden helped me. The first few chapters practice reading katakana, the next few hiragana, and the rest of the book 425 kanji. Each new character introduced is followed by one or more words and several phrases. You can definitely take your time more than with other readers I've seen, which tend to throw too much at you too fast. You need to be learning grammar at the same time by some other means, though, otherwise you sometimes won't understand the sentences even though you can pronounce them. Each chapter introduces 25 kanji, and at the end of each chapter there's a reading selection which reviews everything up to that point. Another reader I've seen in libraries which looks good is Japanese Readers by Oreste Vaccari--but it's out of print.