Life In 19x19

I am working on a new series of ebooks on Japanese for go players called 'The Road to Understanding Japanese'. It continues on from the previous series, Just Enough Japanese. It is aimed at readers who have either worked through Just Enough Japanese volume 3 or have otherwise achieved a good grasp of basic Japanese grammar. For more details, see SmartGo Books https://gobooks.com/books-by-series.htm ... g-japanese.

The books will be available not only for Apple iOS and macOS devices, but also as ePubs (see https://gobooks.com/epub.html) for reader apps on other platforms such as Android and Windows. I have no plans to offer a paper version.

Are you fluent in Japanese? As far as I know, it is a very difficult language and it is really difficult to learn it, let alone teach it to someone.

No, I am not fluent. To date I have limited my books on Japanese to the reading of Japanese go books. The goal is not to speak or compose Japanese or to read newspapers or pass exams. Like many other players, I first bought Japanese go books when I knew no Japanese at all and I just looked at the diagrams. Gradually, I understood more and more of the content. I think such limited Japanese is not as hard as some people believe and I would like to encourage more people to read and buy Japanese books. You can read my bio and background in any of the ebook free samples.Japanese is like go. Even amateurs, even DDKs, can teach beginners. You don't have to be a pro to teach.

I recently read through Just Enough Japanese (JEJ) 1 and I am now going through JEJ22, with JEJ3 available as a reference. I get that volume 1 is covered by online lists like on Sensei's library, but I appreciated the methodical approach. Volume 2 is already giving more insight than the SL article. I look forward to working my way up to The Road to Understanding.